


Convict Coffee

by delicaterosebud



Category: Bleach
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Coffee Shops & Cafés, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Father-Daughter Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Prison, Slow Burn, The Zaraki/Kurotsuchi Coffee Shop AU That Nobody Asked For
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-16
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:26:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 33,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27583366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delicaterosebud/pseuds/delicaterosebud
Summary: Zaraki is a felon, and there’s no two ways about it.He has no marketable skills. No practical abilities. At over forty years of age, he is stuck working a dead-end job at a goddamn coffee shop. At least his coworkers make it all worthwhile – and maybe he’s learned how to brew a damn good cup of coffee, on top of that.The only thing casting a shadow on his little slice of caffeinated paradise, perhaps, is a certain, ill-tempered regular. Now, if only Zaraki could decide whether to kill him or kiss him, maybe he could finally return some semblance of normalcy to his life.
Relationships: Kurotsuchi Mayuri/Zaraki Kenpachi
Comments: 63
Kudos: 49





	1. Chapter 1

“Here he comes.”

Six in the morning, right on the dot. The welcome bell chimed, signaling the arrival of Zaraki’s first – and often the only – customer of the day. Sad as it was, in their modern age of luxury, revolving around privilege and Instagram pastel aestheticism, nobody wanted their coffee served by a one-eyed, ogre of a man and his ragtag bunch of misfits. Their humble coffeehouse, ran almost entirely by former inmates, was a bit of a local oddity, a demerit, in their sleepy little town – so, perhaps it was only fitting, in a sense, that their clientele, or perhaps their sole “client,” in the singular, should be just as strange as the place he frequented.

Zaraki knew little about the man other than his surname, engraved upon the thick, metallic credit card that he’d throw onto the counter every morning with withering disdain, targeted toward whatever unfortunate soul was forced to handle the transaction that morning. 

_M. Kurotsuchi_ –

The M must have stood for Motherfucker. That joyless bastard always found something to complain about, whether it was the coffee or the person who served it. Then again, Zaraki supposed that he couldn’t really blame him. Not entirely. He would have been just as bitter and miserable, too, if he looked the way Kurotsuchi did: a bit like Frankenstein’s monster, all bright colors and patchwork parts. Golden eyes and wild blue hair that never hid the fact that he was missing both ears and a tooth or two, and all of it replaced with the tackiest, bright gold ornamentation that Zaraki had ever seen. Shimmering cochlear implants stuck out like horns, showing The Devil as he truly was.

“So,” Zaraki began, turning towards his two baristas, who hadn’t even put on their aprons yet, “which one of you wants to go wait on His Majesty?”

“Ooh, it looks like he’s in a sour mood, already,” Yumichika tutted, shaking his head. “I think this calls for a manger’s delicate touch,” he suggested, turning to him with that irritating, coquettish little grin that Zaraki never fell for. Not even once. “We wouldn’t want our dear Kurotsuchi-san to lose his temper and start throwing coffee beans at me like last time, would we? I’m a fragile lily, you know. I don’t think I can handle that kind of mistreatment again so soon.”

Ikkaku grimaced.

“Remind me again why we haven’t banned this guy from the store.” 

“Well, look at his watch,” Yumichika practically crooned in a sick combination of envy and adoration. “That’s a Rolex, you know. Kurotsuchi-san must be investing quite a bit of money into this place under the table. I even saw the owner trailing after him like a lost little puppy, the other day. Smiling at him and cooing at him like they were old… well, maybe not friends, but acquaintances, at the very least.”

“Whether he’s lining Urahara’s pockets or not doesn’t matter,” Zaraki interjected. “It don’t change the fact that he’s right now. Let’s just get this asshole his coffee and get him the hell out of here.”

Ikkaku’s finger flew up to his face in a flurry of movement. 

“Nose goes!” he shouted, the action, quickly mirrored by his snickering best friend and leaving Zaraki all alone in the dust. Dumbfounded, he watched, silent and awestruck by his coworkers’ audacity, as, with poorly muffled laughter, they simply turned away from him, pulled their phones out of their pockets, and lingered in the doorway of the kitchen. 

“What the –”

“Looks like you lose, Boss,” Ikkaku taunted with a solemn shake of his head. “Better luck next time.”

Better luck, indeed. Gods knew he’d need it. 

By the time that Kurotsuchi made it to the counter, he was already fuming, scowling down at his iPhone 300, or whatever it was that was featured on the ads, nowadays. His ridiculous, manicured fingers, flying over the screen. In all his life, Zaraki had known only two men who wore makeup and nail polish, and one of them was a drag queen on the weekends. Yumichika was fun, and loud, and boisterous; the colors and sparkles suited him. In contrast, Zaraki didn’t know what the hell Kurotsuchi was supposed to be. 

“Your custom ‘special blend,’ right?” he asked. Black and bitter, just like Kurotsuchi’s soul. “Extra hot?”

For someone who looked so wild, their dear Kurotsuchi was remarkably unadventurous when it came to his palate, always ordering the same damn thing. Zaraki thought that memorizing a customer’s order was a sign of familiarity. Recognizing a regular. Good customer service, and all that jazz. Most people seemed to love the attention, anyway, though in stark contrast, Kurotsuchi seemed to tense up, his expression, darkening, the moment that Zaraki spoke. His Highness glared back at him with suspicion in his narrowed gaze.

“Are you taking note of my preferences?” Kurotsuchi asked like a cobra spitting venom. 

“Hard not to. You order the same thing every morning.”

“Do I?” he retorted, straightening his back and ruffling his feathers. “I’d almost forgotten, considering the fact that your drinks taste different every single time. There’s no consistency in the preparation. You should work on that.”

“You always got something to complain about,” Zaraki grumbled, offhand. Even if he was nothing more than a lowly, mid-level manager, he wasn’t quite as passive as his coworkers – and he wasn’t about to let Kurotsuchi’s vitriol go unchecked. “If you hate the drinks so much, why don’t go somewhere else? There’s a Starbucks down the street.”

“Turning away money, are you? You’re as stupid as you look. This garbage dump is clearly struggling. You don’t have the luxury to be picky about your customers.”

“Maybe. But money ain’t everything. Pretty sure every man in this place would give up their paycheck just to get you to go somewhere else for a month. Spare themselves the torture.”

Before Kurotsuchi could snap back at him – and, _gods_ , could Zaraki see the rage and the fury blazing deep within his eyes – the doorbell chimed once again, though that time, signaling welcomed company.

“’Morning, Ken-chan!” chirped a sprightly, cheerful little voice, brighter than the sun. 

“Yachiru –” he stammered, shocked to see her on a weekday. “Don’t you have school today?”

“Classes don’t start until eight. I got some extra money selling keychains online this week, so I wanted to get some cake before class!”

“What’re you talking about?” he scoffed, his expression, endlessly fond beneath the mess of scars and wrinkles. “You don’t need to sell anything to come here. You get cake for free. My treat, every time.”

It was the least that he could do for her, all things considered. 

When he was in prison, in what seemed like a lifetime ago, Zaraki had grown accustomed to getting chicken-scratch letters in his mailbox, all sent from schoolkids who barely understood just what they were writing – or even to whom they were writing for. It was a program from the local schools, but one that was rarely appreciated from either end of the exchange. Most of the children were “voluntold” to participate, and most of the prisoners never read the letters. Only a handful ever wrote back, with Zaraki, unexpectedly, becoming one of the few. In truth, he couldn’t quite explain what it was that spurred him to pick up his pen, that day, all those years ago. He liked to blame it all on morbid curiosity – or perhaps it was because the faceless, unnamed girl in that letter was the first person in his life who had ever spoken to him like a human being. 

Instead of being met with the typical line of interrogation – was he sorry for what he did, and would he take it all back if he could – she asked for favorite colors. Favorite foods, and whether she could send him a snack, every now and again. 

It was all that kept him sane in that maggot’s nest. 

Yachiru tilted her head in an act of childish curiosity. “Won’t your boss get mad if you do that?” she asked, as she waddled her way towards the counter. 

“Urahara?” That guy was too stoned to be feeling anything other than warm, foggy bliss. “I don’t think he’s ever been mad about anything in his entire life. I could total his car, and he’d be fine with it.”

At that point, Zaraki had half expected his dear Kurotsuchi-san to blow his gasket from being ignored, and for a child, of all people, but when he turned around, and he took one good look at Yachiru, it was almost as though every ounce of anger bled away from his body, leaving him limp, and quiet, and empty. 

His golden eyes narrowed, shrewd and discerning. 

“I recognize you. You’re –”

“Hey, Mayurin!” Yachiru greeted, every bit as strangely cheerful towards that demon as she was towards Zaraki, himself. “I didn’t know you knew about this place. They have the best cakes, don’t they?”

“I’m not entirely certain. I only come here for the coffee.”

“Boo. That’s such a boring, old man answer,” she teased. “You could try the cake, sometime. Nemuri likes it, you know? We came here the other day. She thinks the cake’s really good, too – especially the strawberry one.” 

It was a jarring juxtaposition: Yachiru’s innocent girlhood, her cheerful charm, in stark contrast to Kurotsuchi’s solemnity, a strange maturity of character in spite of grotesque appearances. He didn’t talk for the longest time. He went stiff and frigid, standing there, looking at her, with his hands, folded gently in front of his waist. His fingers, intertwined, cold and motionless.

“How is she?” he asked her, suddenly, in a voice so quiet that Zaraki barely just caught it above the gentle hum of the coffee machines. 

“She’s okay. She’s still mad that you missed the dance last week, though,” Yachiru scolded, sounding more like a disapproving mother instead of a teenage girl. “She says she’s over it, and she doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, but I know she’s still mad. You should try to do something nice for her next weekend.”

“She’s still holding that against me, is she?” he sighed, infinitely weary, low and deep, like steam, rising up from the core of the earth. “I see how it is.”

“Maybe you should buy her a piece of cake to say you’re sorry!” Yachiru suggested, “I can give it to her when I see her in school.”

Zaraki didn’t know what to think. When Kurotsuchi turned back to him, it was with a strange, foul expression – a viscous, clashing suspension of bitterness and embarrassment, of pure negativity, that congealed the saliva in Zaraki’s throat, choking him just from having been exposed to it.

“I’ll have the usual,” Kurotsuchi practically demanded, loud and monotone. “And I’ll have one of those… miniature strawberry layer cakes. To go.”

“You, uh… want a greeting tag with that?” Zaraki asked, still unsettled by the strange direction their morning meeting had taken. It was the longest that Kurotsuchi had ever stood in their café without throwing a fit over something. In fact, the man seemed almost tamed, at the moment, cowed into silence and timidity. “I can print out whatever message you want.”

“I’d prefer to write it myself,” he insisted, tugging an obnoxiously designed, luxury fountain pen from his pocket, all black and gold, just like the man, himself. Manscara and guyliner. 

With the coffee grinder starting up, Zaraki slowly boxed up the cake as, out of the corner of his eye, he watched Kurotsuchi begin to sweat. His pen, hovering mere millimeters from the paper, drew closer to the paper and then pulled back. Closer, then farther away. Close, then far. It repeated that very same sequence again and again until time, itself, seemed to lose all meaning. 

Closer and farther, closer and farther.

“Something wrong?” Zaraki asked.

“Give me a minute to think!” he hissed. “Don’t you have coffee to prepare?”

“You don’t have to get all pissed off about it,” he growled, though he did as he was asked, just to get Kurotuschi out of his café. As Zaraki went to work on the pour over, from a distance, he watched him write, in crisp and perfect penmanship: _Consider this a formal apology for missing your dance recital. Love_ –

Kurotsuchi hesitated for a moment, before crossing out the last few characters. 

_Best wishes, from Daddy_

He attached the card to the little, ornate cake box, and handed it over to Yachiru. 

“Don’t read it,” he demanded in quick, punctuated speech, every consonant, crisp and accentuated. There was a strange sense of righteous fury behind those words. It made Zaraki feel dirty, somehow, for having intruded upon such a private moment, bearing witness to a sacred and powerful sentiment that was reserved only for a man who held it. It made him feel like a criminal, all over again. 

“I won’t,” Yachiru replied with a quick, cartoonish salute. “I promise! Scout’s honor.” 

“Good.” 

Without even looking Zaraki’s way, Kurotsuchi grabbed his coffee and stalked out the door. Normally, the man carried himself with an odd, effortless confidence, his head, held high and his steps, bold and long. That morning, however, he seemed to scamper away with his tail between his legs, almost as though he couldn’t wait to get out of there and back to the safety of wherever it was that he went in the mornings. When he was finally gone and out of sight, Zaraki let out a weary breath, exhausted. 

“You know that guy?” he asked Yachiru, as he began to clean up his supplies. From a distance, he watched as Yachiru pulled a barstool up to the counter and leaned forward, resting her chin upon her folded arms. “He’s a regular here, but he ain’t exactly the friendly type. Never went out of his way to talk to any of us. How do you know him so well?” 

He didn’t fully intend to sound as suspicious as he did, but Zaraki figured that Kurotsuchi deserved a little scrutiny. That man certainly looked like the mischievous type, after all. Zaraki swore to himself: if that bastard was creeping on Yachiru from the internet chatrooms, or Facebook, or MySpace, or whatever it was that teenagers used to talk to each other in recent years, Zaraki was going to bash that fuckers’s head against the counter, drag him into the back, and grind his bones right alongside the coffee beans that he hated so much. 

“You mean Mayurin?” Yachiru asked him, lifting her head as Zaraki placed a little plate of strawberry cake by her side. “Me and his daughter are in the same class. I had to do a project with her, once, so I got to go over to her house and everything, and we started hanging out after that. Her dad’s really smart, you know! Mayurin used to be a doctor, so he’s really good at chemistry, and math, and stuff. He helped us with our science fair project and everything. We won first place!”

“Hold up,” Zaraki interjected, brushing aside all of Yachiru’s added fluff to focus in on the one singular point of interest that had somehow eluded him until that moment. It was just so bizarre that it took all that time to finally sink in. “That guy actually has a kid? A real kid?”

Zaraki couldn’t believe, for the life of him, that there was actually a freethinking woman out there in the world who had decided, of her own free will, to have sex with a man like Kurotsuchi. To get in bed with him. To have a _kid_ with him, of all people. That prissy, scrawny, makeup-wearing asshat who looked so weak, he couldn’t carry a gallon of milk up a flight of stairs without getting winded – and that bastard got laid when Zaraki couldn’t. 

The guy wasn’t even six feet tall. 

“Her name’s Nemuri,” Yachiru answered. “She’s a little younger than the rest of us, since she skipped a grade in elementary school. Nobody really talks to her, you know? She’s kind of shy, and people always pick on her. I try to stick up for her when I can, but I don’t think it’s really working. I think she’s an easy target because of what happened to her family.”

Now, that certainly caught his attention. Setting down his cups and spoons, Zaraki leaned over the countertop, listening intently. 

“What happened? Something bad?”

“Well, I don’t know a lot about it,” Yachiru admitted, twirling her hair. “I don’t think anyone really does. It’s all just gossip. All we know for sure is that her parents are divorced, and Mayurin isn’t allowed to be with her unless someone else is there with them. I think he went to jail for something? Nobody really knows for what, though.”

“And you went to his house?” Zaraki sputtered. Yachiru had always been the trusting type, but never had he imagined that she would be stupid enough to wander into a convict’s house. Well, a convict other than him and Ikkaku, anyway.

“I was a little scared at first, too, but there really was someone else there, so I felt a little safer. His name’s… Akon, I think? I think he’s a family friend. Someone who makes sure that Mayurin is following all the rules and stuff.” 

“I wonder what he did,” Zaraki mused, more to himself than anybody else.

“Maybe you should ask him,” Yachiru shrugged. “Nemuri says her dad’s always honest about stuff like that. He doesn’t really try to hide it, you know? It’s one of the things she likes most about him: his honesty. I’m pretty sure he’d tell you, if you asked.” 

“You think so? Maybe I’ll give it a shot if I’m feeling ballsy that day,” he joked, completely insincere. Kurotsuchi would probably sue him for slander – or board up the doors and burn down the café with all the workers trapped inside of it.

Even with Yachiru’s glowing confidence, Zaraki wasn’t so certain about the validity of her testimony. After all, teenage girls weren’t anything like grown men. For ex-cons, especially, digging around in man’s past was a surefire way of getting punched in the teeth. Even if Kurotsuchi was three heads shorter and half his weight, there was something about that man, painted bright like a poisoned frog, that gave Zaraki the sense that he was dangerous.


	2. Chapter 2

Six in the morning, right on the dot, the door slammed open with explosive force, hard enough to shake the glass panels and send the rusted hinges shrieking from the strain. It was almost impressive. Kurotsuchi could turn even the most mundane of acts into melodramas. He burst through that door with such needless force, it was almost as though he had a personal vendetta against the hinges. He strode in like he owned the place, with the confidence of a king and a fool, in his makeup and his kimono, his little blue mohawk and his golden eyes. 

Zaraki never knew what to make of him. 

Kurotsuchi, in a temper, placed his usual order, as he always did, and Zaraki poured his coffee in wordless silence. It was the same, old routine – or, at the very least, it would have been, had Zaraki not been struck, suddenly, by the strangest urge to glance at him: to truly stop and look, as though observing the man for the very first time. It was his conversation with Yachiru that had spurred his interest, and his own damn curiosity that wouldn’t let it die. 

In silence, he watched. His single eye wandered, caught by the flurry of movement from long, painted fingernails, shimmering blue, tapping incessantly against a screen. While Ikkaku’s phone was a faded, ancient hunk of plastic and Yumichika’s, cracked screen and all, wasn’t much better, Kurotsuchi’s hardware was pristine. Not a single scratch or fingerprint – almost as clean and composed as the man who owned it. 

Kurotsuchi had a woman’s hands, he realized: soft and smooth where Zaraki’s were calloused. And Zaraki realized, at that moment, that as brightly as Kurotsuchi blazed, at times, the man was physically delicate. He wouldn’t have lasted long, in prison. Considering that, Zaraki began to doubt Yachiru’s story completely. 

Only one way to find out, he supposed. 

“That girl that was here yesterday – she told me something interesting about you,” Zaraki blurted out, suddenly, before his better judgement could catch up with him and force him to still his waggling tongue. 

It was the first time he’d ever spoken to Kurotsuchi about anything more than the quality of his coffee and the supposedly poor customer service he always received. Zaraki’s heart stopped and he froze, hand hovering over the coffee cup, his fingers, still over the steam. He didn’t know what he was expecting: for Kurotsuchi to snarl at him and tell him to shut up, perhaps. Or maybe for the man to pull out a knife and drive it through his palm just for having the audacity to speak to him. 

Instead, Kurotsuchi, in slow, smooth movements, like a statue brought to life, craned up his neck and looked at him, wide-eyed, silent, and eerily expressionless. In the half minute that passed, he never so much as blinked. Shrunken, black pupils cut a stark contrast against the gold of Kurotsuchi’s irises. It was an otherworldly cold, black as frostbite, that crept up Zaraki’s spine and sent goosebumps rising from the nape of his neck. In all that time, Kurotsuchi didn’t say a single word. Perfectly still, he stared at Zaraki from the corner of his eye. Black and gold. 

Zaraki swallowed hard around the dry lump in his throat and realized that if he didn’t continue, Kurotsuchi would never respond. 

“She told me you did some time in the past. Is that right? To be honest, I never would’ve guessed just from looking at you. Most ex-cons look rough, out of prison, but you’re… you’re different.”

Nothing. Kurotsuchi’s thumb still hovered, motionless, above his phone, though the screen had long turned black. Either he hadn’t yet noticed, or he just didn’t give a damn. For what felt like ages, Kurotsuchi looked at him. Saying nothing. Doing nothing. 

“Is that why you come here?” Zaraki asked, setting Kurotsuchi’s freshly brewed cup of coffee down onto the counter. “Because this place gives second chances to people like us? You believe in the cause, too?”

Their shop was unique in that regard, with ten percent of all profits, meager as they were, going towards prison education systems: libraries and workshops. Learning opportunities. It was a cause that many people in their ritzy, uptown neighborhood weren’t interested in supporting, and yet Zaraki stood by what they did. For a man who came from humble roots and who was saved only by a girl who believed that he could be better, he understood just how important rehabilitation efforts could be for a man.

Kurotsuchi’s sudden movement, no matter how lethargic, how sluggishly smooth, startled Zaraki out of his reverie. That painted hand slowly lowered and slipped his phone into his pocket. He twisted his neck until the vertebrae cracked. 

“To be perfectly candid, I don’t believe in much of anything,” Kurotsuchi said, suddenly, in a ghastly voice that sucked the breath from Zaraki’s lungs. It was a hollow, withered thing, emotionless and monotone, more befitting an android than an actual man. The cognitive dissonance was almost uncanny. 

“You mean… you don’t believe in helping prisoners? Or is it that you don’t believe in charities?”

“Maybe it’s both,” Kurotsuchi answered, apathetic and nonchalant. He reached for his coffee and swirled it gently in its cup. “I come here because the coffee suits my tastes, for the time being. When that changes, I’ll take my business elswhere. It’s as simple a matter as that. Don’t overthink it. And don’t be so presumptuous as to speak as though you know what I believe in. My thought processes are beyond your meager comprehension as it is.”

That arrogant little fuck – 

“You think you’re so clever. Well, you can shove it. You ain’t better than me,” Zaraki snapped back, his scowl, rivaling Kurotsuchi’s in its ferocity. “If Yachiru was right, and I think she was, then you and me ain’t so different. If you’re really an ex-con, then we were both in the exact same place at some time in our lives: only it’s the prissy little cumrags like you that get pushed around in prison. Am I right? Hell, you probably got screwed over by guys exactly like me. That why you always give me and my team a hard time, Kurotsuchi? You taking out some misplaced anger?”

“Oh, I assure you,” he said, in that frigid, blistering voice, quiet and sharp, “my anger is directed precisely where it needs to be.”

Well, that was as good of a confirmation as Zaraki needed.

“So, Yachiru really was right, huh?” he scoffed, crossing his arms. “What were you in for? Fashion crimes? Prostitution? Jaywalking?”

“You should look it up, if you’re so curious,” Kurotsuchi replied, already turning away towards the door. “It’s a matter of public record.”

“You really think I’d go digging up that kind of shit online? Maybe I’m giving you a hard time now, but I ain’t about to stoop that low,” Zaraki practically spat at him, incredulous. He sighed, running his fingers through his messy hair, as he bided his time, struggling to decide just how honest he should be with a man who knew nothing of the concept. “Look, I know how it is, having that kind of baggage follow you around for the rest of your life. Everyone wants to look into it: your neighbors, your boss. I ain’t about to take advantage of your public record and start digging for blackmail material, or gossip, or anything.”

“Then I suppose that you’ll never find out about it,” Kurotsuchi replied as he reached for his coffee. Once he broke eye contact, he never looked back. 

Zaraki still had so many questions to ask, so much he wanted to say, and yet Kurotsuchi had already decided, independently, that their conversation was over. He took one sip of his coffee, judged it satisfactory, and then turned on his heel and made for the door. When his fingers settled on the handle, however, Kurotsuchi paused, his gaze, still trained towards the sidewalk and so far from Zaraki. 

“If I were in your position, however,” Kurotsuchi added, suddenly, “I wouldn’t have any qualms about digging into my history. Then again,” he shrugged, tilting his head to the side with a strangely youthful playfulness. “I suppose that I’ve always been the curious type.”

“Ain’t there a saying about that?” Zaraki asked, half-hoping to stall Kurotsuchi for just a little longer, “‘Curiosity killed the cat.’ Isn’t that it?”

As though answering Zaraki’s call, Kurotsuchi turned back, glancing at him over his shoulder with a peculiar, jagged smile that never reached his eyes. 

“Maybe. But I haven’t run out of lives quite yet, now have I?”

Kurotsuchi extended his arm, and the doorbell chimed. Just like that, he stalked outside without so much as waiting for Zaraki’s response. In truth, Zaraki didn’t understand just what Kurotsuchi was trying to tell him, but one thing was certain: Kurotsuchi was a different kind of animal, unlike all of those he’d met in the past. Unlike Ikkaku, simple and boisterous, and Yumichika, loyal and caring. Unlike Yachiru, wholly innocent. Kurotsuchi was a complicated man, and one that Zaraki doubted that he’d ever understand. 

Perhaps it was just as Kurotsuchi had said and some things were beyond his comprehension, after all. 

\-------

Kurotsuchi never stayed for long. He never pulled up a barstool or lingered about, making small talk. He was always in a hurry: frantically typing on his phone or hurling profanities at some helpless assistant over the Bluetooth attachment, hooked onto his implant. He was a quick, in and out type of customer. In fact, an extended visit from Kurotsuchi was more of an ill omen for Zaraki’s staff than anything else. He only ever stayed to complain, throwing coffee and demanding refunds. It was ridiculous: a man draped in silk and gold, fighting tooth and nail over a bit of loose change. Zaraki suspected, however, that Kurotsuchi was the special type of human being who could start an argument over just about anything.

It was precisely for that reason that, when Kurotsuchi lingered in the shop that morning after grabbing his coffee, Zaraki prepared himself for a fight, shoving Yumichika and Ikkaku into the kitchen so that he could take the brunt of the madness. Kurotsuchi took a sip of his coffee, stared down into his cup, stepped towards the counter. 

T-minus ten seconds. 

Zaraki hunched forward and waited for him to explode like a goddamn nuke, but the moment their eyes met, all went still, and the room was silent. Kurotsuchi looked at him through that smoky stare, silent and heavy, beneath blue eyelashes and dark mascara. An eerie calm fell over the room, and a chill ran down Zaraki’s spine.

The corners of Kurotsuchi’s lips twitched up into a wicked smile, sharp and sinister. 

“Zaraki Kenpachi… is not your true name, is it? I wasn’t expecting that kind of secrecy from a barista, of all people.”

Zaraki glanced down, quickly, at the name tag pinned onto his apron. It bore the name that he’d been given by the woman who’d save his life. The woman who’d gave him purpose. That golden name that had been bestowed upon him with honor, blood, and pride, when his previous existence, all patchwork memories of degradation of insignificance were better off buried. 

“How’d you figure that out?” he asked, his expression, darkening. Zaraki gripped down onto the countertops hard enough to turn his fingers white, a startling contrast against the bruised callouses marring his knuckles. “You go digging around in my arrest records or something?”

“You sound so surprised,” Kurotsuchi scoffed, tilting his head towards the sky until he was literally looking down at him. Zaraki had to resist the urge to punch him in the teeth. “I’d only assumed that you’ve already done the same for me. Don’t tell me I was wrong about that.”

“You were,” Zaraki practically growled, leaning over the counter, closer and closer towards the customer that he somehow grew to hate more with every passing day. He towered over Kurotsuchi, the Goliath to his David, and just like that comparison, that smaller man never wavered. Still as a statue and just as hardened, Kurotsuchi checked Zaraki’s aggression, staring him down with cauterizing neutrality. Zaraki wanted nothing more than to shatter that stillness. “I said I wouldn’t stoop to dirty shit like that, and I meant it. I can’t believe that you –”

“Can’t you?” Kurotsuchi asked him with a tilt of his head, hard and quick as a gunshot. “Are you honestly surprised that I looked? I already told you: I’m the morbidly curious type – and quite the opportunist, on top of that. If something is useful, I will make use of it. I haven’t come this far in life through equity and ethics, anyway.”

“Sounds like something a white-collar criminal would say,” Zaraki snapped back, taking a guess. Shaking his head in clear disapproval, he crossed his arms and put some distance between the two of them. Though Kurotsuchi’s fingers twitched in interest, didn’t respond. He didn’t speak for the longest time. Instead, standing there, separated by a countertop, he simply stared. They both did. Piercing gold eyes against a single, dull grey, revealing nothing. 

In the stillness and the silence, Kurotsuchi’s jaw tightened, molars, grinding, almost as though he was thinking, hard, over whether or not Zaraki deserved so much as a simple, verbal response. Zaraki wouldn’t have been surprised if that man simply turned on his heel and walked out the door. Instead, however, perhaps against his expectations, Kurotsuchi let out a calm, quiet breath – and he smiled.

“I suppose that I can tell you, if you must be so insistent on prying. In a way, I suppose that it would only be just. I already know so much about you, after all.”

Though his smile was playful, there was something in his tone that seemed reluctant. Feeling the growing tension, the strain of civility, between them, Zaraki rubbed at his neck and broke their eye contact. 

“Look, I was just messin’ with you. You don’t actually have to tell me if –”

“You were imprisoned for ten years. Is that correct?” Kurotsuchi asked, crossing his arms. He cut him off with such confidence that all Zaraki could do was shut up and listen. “I can tell you that my sentence was far longer than that.”

“Hold up… Really?” Zaraki asked, actually shaking his head from the shellshock. “The hell did you do?” 

Instead of answering immediately like an ordinary man, Kurotsuchi said nothing – simply crossing his arms and glancing around the room until his gaze settled upon a little set of sofas in the corner of the café. It wasn’t like him at all to linger so long, but he took his coffee and slid into the leather armchair by the wall. Without once looking back to see if Zaraki had followed, Kurotsuchi stared silently out the window with an unreadable yet tense expression of deep contemplation. It was type of expression carved into marble and painted on canvas a thousand years past, back in the age of philosophy, when the world still held untold mystery for humanity. 

Kurotsuchi never once told him to follow, and yet Zaraki felt the tug of the leash – or the noose – all the same, cinching suffocatingly tight around his neck. His legs seemed to move of their own, independent will, leading him around the counter and across the room. 

When he sat at the couch across from Kurotsuchi, he realized that the man was studying him, tracing the wrinkles and scars that cut across Zaraki’s reddened, wind-burned face. He focused in on his eyepatch, and his posture softened.

“Your court records indicate that you were arrested for gang related matters: robbery, assault, and the like. Is that accurate?”

Though he bore blatant, physical scars from his time in prison, it wasn’t as though Zaraki was an open book when it came to his history. Nobody had ever asked him about his past, and he never felt the need to share it. He, and Ikkaku, and Yumichika had all worked together in their own unique brand of boisterous harmony because they all had come to that same understanding. Yesterday was nothing; the only thing that ever mattered is where they were in present day. 

For that reason, when Kurotsuchi had the audacity to ask, Zaraki couldn’t help but hesitate. For a moment, he considered kicking Kurotsuchi out the door and banning him from the café – but there was something about him, something about his own growing sense of morbid curiosity, that gave him the courage he needed to speak. 

“Yeah,” Zaraki answered, leaning back against the cushions. “It is. I ran with a gang when I was younger.”

“Oh, but of course. I wouldn’t expect anything less. Why, look at you,” Kurotsuchi scoffed, as a flash of disgust twisted over his features. “You’ve barely changed. I can already imagine you in your youth, sauntering about with your trousers, dragging over the floor.”

“I never looked like that,” Zaraki stammered, eager to protect his image. He wasn’t classy, sure – nobody would ever argue that he was a gentleman – but he wasn’t some kind of hapless hooligan with his belt around his ankles. “I wasn’t some no-name thug, Kurotsuchi. I had status, you know? I wasn’t like the others. I didn’t get into crime for the money or the drugs; I just wanted to make a name for myself. Get some street cred. Prove that I was the toughest one out there.”

“Do you regret it?” Kurotsuchi asked, and oh, if Zaraki’s heart didn’t sink. It was the most common question he’d ever been asked, and to hear something so out of touch, so bourgeois, from a man as colorful as Kurotsuchi was such a crushing disappointment. He was just about to cut their conversation short when a sly, knowing smile wormed across the other man’s face – and the horrific beauty of it, ivory and gold, held him like a spell. “You can answer however you’d like, but I suspect that you don’t regret a thing,” Kurotsuchi continued with a single shouldered shrug. “Dirt and blood seem to suit you quite a bit better than a café apron does.”

“Can’t argue with that. But that’s what MMA’s for, now,” Zaraki answered with an airy chuckle, strangely relieved by Kurotsuchi’s answer, blatantly honest. “All my fighting’s legal now. It ain’t exactly the same, but MMA gives me the kind of rush that running with gangs used to do. It ain’t as intense, but it ain’t too bad a deal, when you think about it. But you know, it’s weird that you’d catch on to something like that,” he added with a reluctant grin. “Not a lot of people would get it.”

“Don’t be so presumptuous. I don’t quite ‘get it’ either,” Kurotsuchi snapped back, shutting him down. “I’ve never understood why men turn to gang violence… but I understand ambition well enough. The drive for self-improvement, the thrill of victory: it’s all very familiar territory.”

“So, what were you in for, then, if it wasn’t gangs and it wasn’t money?” Gods knew Zaraki didn’t know what else it could possibly be. It would have to be something terrible. Something life-altering and shameful – and yet, despite that, it became clear to Zaraki that Kurotsuchi actually intended to give him an answer. 

Just like Yachiru had said, in the end, the man was every bit as honest as she’d claimed that he was. Kurotsuchi met his gaze, and he smiled.

“I was convicted of murder. Twenty-five years,” he mentioned off-handedly, taking a sip of his coffee, as though he were discussing something as inconsequential as the weather. “I’m still on parole. I will be for a while, yet.”

Zaraki paused for a moment, half expecting Kurotsuchi to burst out laughing, only to tell him that he’d been kidding from the start – but when Kurotsuchi only leaned back into his chair, sipping at his coffee, Zaraki wondered if it wasn’t the truth, after all.

“Really?” he asked, still skeptical.

“Really,” Kurotsuchi echoed, still so noncommittal.

“That’s the big leagues. Even guys like me know not to go that far.”

“Well, I’m clearly nothing like you, am I? Honestly, I’m grateful for that,” Kurotsuchi replied, simple and plain, as he slowly stood from his chair. “Remember what I told you today, Zaraki –” he added, with a cunning, cruel little lilt when he whispered his name: three little syllables, tongue against palate, that had never sounded so sharp in any other voice. “I’m dangerous. You should keep that in mind while preparing my coffee, from now on. One more unsatisfying cup, and I may just feel the need to prove that point.” 

Zaraki had only ever seen the man when he was angry, but Kurotsuchi’s laughter, louder than a sonic boom, shook through his body like an earthquake, wreaking havoc. A voice so loud, so blazingly bright, had no right coming from a man so small. It was better suited an atom bomb.

“Wait,” Zaraki called after him, as Kurotsuchi stalked towards the door, “where are you going?”

“To work,” Kurotsuchi replied, as coldly casual as ever, almost as though he couldn’t believe that Zaraki was stupid enough to ask. “I’m late as it is. It wouldn’t do to linger here any longer.” 

“You’re just going to leave it at that?” Zaraki stammered, incredulous, as though a meager guilt-trip could convince Kurotsuchi to turn around and stay when he’d already demonstrated, time and again, that he came and went by his own whim and nobody else’s. 

“I really am. To be frank, Zaraki, you don’t exactly interest me enough to stay,” Kurotsuchi said, leaving him behind and walking straight out the door. 

Though their conversation was just as unpleasant as all the ones that had come before, it left Zaraki thirsting after another acrid taste of Kurotsuchi’s poison, all the same. It was the mystery of it all. The danger and the rivalry, that made Zaraki feel the same kind of tingle down his spine, the same satisfying pain, as he did when he wrapped bandages over his bloodied knuckles after a rough day on the streets, all those decades ago.


	3. Chapter 3

Zaraki didn’t know what he was expecting after his little heart to heart with Kurotsuchi. 

As foolish as it was, perhaps he’d expected there to be a newfound sense of closeness between them, or at least the quiet, unspoken kind of kinship that formed between two men who’d endured the same kind of hardships. It was nothing as soft nor as kind as friendship, but it was _something_.

Zaraki had expected… something. 

But Kurotsuchi never spoke of it again. He never acknowledged the conversation they’d shared and the moment of honesty, of vulnerability, that had passed between them. The days turned into weeks and into months, and Kurotsuchi’s silence, that icy façade, never so much as wavered. All he ever did was complain about the taste of the coffee, just as he always did, offering no new revelations, no more insight. The man was frigidity and hubris, all over again. 

Kurotsuchi wouldn’t even look at him. 

It was for that reason that Zaraki found himself sitting at his desk, one evening, staring into the faintly glowing screen of his computer. His finger hovered over the mouse, moments away from submitting Kurotsuchi’s name into the justice department’s database. Yachiru had called him “Mayurin” – in their part of the country, Mayuris were a yen a dozen, but he’d never met another that was male. Knowing that, he’d get results for certain, if only he had the audacity to click the link. Though Kurotsuchi himself had all but encouraged him to look, Zaraki couldn’t help but feel the tendrils of guilt creeping into his mind like ivy, slow and sinister, between the brick.

He was going to violate another man’s privacy in the most intimate of ways. The fact that Kurotsuchi didn’t care one way or another didn’t make the act any less unjust, and yet, when he’d come so far, Zaraki couldn’t stop himself, he clicked the link, and watched his cursor spin.

\---------

Kurotsuchi reminded him of a patchwork doll: all scavenged, mismatched parts, hastily stitched together to form a blind god’s ignorant vision of a human being. If humans truly were made in God’s image, as the Christian’s claimed, Zaraki could only wonder what type of demon had pieced Kurotsuchi together. What kind of cosmic joke he must have been, with his missing ears and his scarred jaw. If Zaraki looked closely enough, he almost swore that he could see the ghost of stitches marring Kurotsuchi’s chin, like memories of knifework and nails upon his darkened flesh, almost as though someone truly had shattered him to pieces and glued him back together. Whole again, but worse for wear. Kurotsuchi almost looked as though he were made of silicon and plastic rather than flesh and blood. In spite of all that damage, however, though he was undeniably _ugly_ in the way that broken things often were, Kurotsuchi carried himself with a peculiar brand of confidence that Zaraki couldn’t help but almost admire. It bordered on arrogance, absolute. It suited the man more than Zaraki cared to admit. He understood him, now: it wasn’t that Kurotsuchi was overcompensating for something quite as much as he was trying to live up to his own lofty expectations for himself. 

Zaraki didn’t realize how effortless Kurotsuchi’s confidence had seemed until he’d taken a glimpse of the opposite, for once.

He’d seen the image only for a moment, just long enough for his heart to stop and for a cruel, frigid chill to shiver down his spine. Tearing his eyes away from his computer screen, jabbed his finger against the monitor’s power button and shot upright, pushing himself away from his desk. His chair, skittering against the dusty wooden floor. His heart was racing a mile a minute, and though he knew he was alone, he felt the strangest urge to glance towards the door, just to check again. He felt like a teenage boy, caught with porn on his screen and his dick in his hand – his mother, screaming at him from the doorway. He felt dirty. Disgusting. Wrong. He’d felt more like a criminal, at that moment, while peeping at Kurotsuchi’s mugshot, than he did when he was bound in fetters and locked in a cage, all those years ago. 

Even a late-night shower couldn’t wash the sin away, nor could the double shot of whiskey, stirred into his coffee the very next morning. Zaraki had woken up extra early to delete his search history and clear his cookies, erasing all evidence of his crimes, and yet, as he drove to work, as he opened the shop, the memory of Kurotsuchi’s mugshot refused to dissipate. It lingered, dark, beneath his eyelid. It was something that he’d never been meant to see. Something private, soft, and fragile: a secret better left buried. It was a cruel and grotesque holiness. He’d seen the image of a fallen man. A man in his lowest his moment of weakness and his greatest time of need. 

The Kurotsuchi in that picture was hardly the kingly presence he knew, with his nose in the air and that condescending snarl on his face. The Kurotsuchi he’d seen was just a boy, barely at the cusp of manhood, with his gelled hair and his nerdy little glasses, wide-eyed and terrified, clutching onto his mugshot placard with broken, painted fingernails. He looked like the victim instead of the murderer, with his smudged eyeliner, running down his cheeks. Such a stark contrast from the man he knew, who stood before him with his eyes on fire, burning gold, brighter than the sun. 

That morning, when Kurotsuchi ordered his usual pour over, Zaraki was the one who couldn’t bring himself to look his way. 

“I’ve always hated apologies, but… I did something I really shouldn’t have,” Zaraki admitted, the words, coming out like broken glass in his bile, as he choked out the words. “And I’m sorry for that.”

“What did you do?” Kurotsuchi asked, tossing his credit card onto the counter, none the wiser. A part of Zaraki wanted to backpedal, to say nothing at all and return to their quiet, distant normalcy. He wanted to go back nothing more than strangers. A joyless smile twisted across Kurotsuchi’s face, the playful expression, never reaching his unblinking, golden eyes. “Did you spit in my drink? I make a point of watching you, every morning, while you work. If you somehow managed to slip that past me, regardless, I suppose that I’d deserve it, for being so oblivious.”

“It ain’t anything like that,” Zaraki chuckled, grateful that Kurotsuchi had lightened the mood, somewhat – even if it was in his own, special way. “I’m serious about this job. I don’t fuck with people’s food.”

“Then whatever could it be?”

Zaraki took a deep breath, burning the aching stretch of his ribs into his memory. 

“Yesterday night,” he began, “I looked up your arrest records. Saw your mugshot and everything. I know I said I wouldn’t do it, but what you said, a while ago, about being a murderer – it got me so damn curious I just –” He shook his head, disgusted with himself. He was going to say that he couldn’t help it, but Zaraki knew that wasn’t true. He had no excuses. “Point is, that was real low of me. I shouldn’t have stuck my nose where it didn’t belong.”

When Kurotsuchi shifted suddenly, Zaraki wondered, for a split second, whether he was going to slap him – but he only placed his index finger on his credit card and slid it another centimeter closer. 

“I told you once, already: I don’t mind,” Kurotsuchi replied, as shockingly distant as ever. Kurotsuchi’s neutrality, at that moment, almost gave him whiplash. “That part of my history is a matter of public record. You can read and distribute those files all you’d like.”

Zaraki let out a breathy, awkward chuckle that seemed to release with it all of his pent-up anxiety. Taking Kurotsuchi’s credit card, he tapped it on the counter, feeling its weight, before sliding the card through the reader. 

“Are you for real, right now? You’re saying it don’t bother you, having people digging around in your past?” he asked, squinting at him in confusion and genuine curiosity. “Really? How are you okay with that?”

“I have to be,” Kurotsuchi replied with a one-shouldered shrug. He was calm and still like the eye of a storm, even when Zaraki knew he was a hurricane. “The topic always comes up eventually, whether in business or in casual conversation. I can’t allow that to wound me every time I hear it, now can I? I’d be breaking down on a daily basis, if that were the case. If I want to be able to move on with my life, I have to come to terms with the past. My reputation will always precede me. I don’t intend to run from it.”

Stunned by the shamelessly audacity of that revelation, taken aback by the confidence, Zaraki could only stand there, staring back at him in reluctant admiration. 

“Damn,” he exclaimed, finally, tugging the receipt from the printer. “You know, Kurotsuchi, you don’t look like much, especially for an ex-con, but what you said just now was actually kind of badass.” 

“Amazing, aren’t I?” Kurotsuchi replied with a stiff, thin smile, as he plucked the receipt from between Zaraki’s fingers. 

“Yeah,” he mockingly agreed. “You’re a real piece of work.”

“The gods’ magnum opus. One of a kind,” he declared, spreading his arms wide, the sleeves of his haori, billowing out and showcasing its wearer in all of his golden, patchwork glory.

“I always thought a guy like you wouldn’t believe in gods.”

“Only ironically,” Kurotsuchi teased with a slow, stiff waggle of his index finger. 

Though Zaraki had a million opening tasks to complete, dishes to wash and pastries to warm, it was almost as though the world had dissipated away, leaving only the two of them. Feet nailed to the floor, Zaraki couldn’t have moved to save his life. He wanted so much to indulge in that moment of relative peace, watching, observing with something close to reverence, as Kurotsuchi gave him a quick smirk goodbye and turned on his heel, leaving him behind. Zaraki didn’t realize how much time had passed, going so far as to forget about his duties and his friends, until the kitchen door squeaked open. 

“Hey boss –” Ikkaku called for him, startling him out of his reverie, “you gonna help us get ready today, or what?”

Yumichika leaned over his shoulder – 

“Of course not. Can’t you see he’s too busy chatting it up with Kurotsuchi-san?” Yumichika pouted, feigning jealousy. “Is it because he’s rich? Are you looking for a sugar daddy? I prefer to be the baby, myself, but I wouldn’t mind forking over a little bit of money if it would mean that I get to be with you.”

Yumichika dug a teasing finger into his chest – though Zaraki only grabbed him by the wrist, gently pulling him away. 

“You know I ain’t into dudes,” he laughed, shutting him down as playfully as possible. “But if I was, you’d be my first choice. Don’t you worry about that.”

“I know, but you can’t blame a man for trying,” he crooned with a sorrowful pout. “I think Kurotsuchi-san is trying pretty hard, too, by the way,” he added with a wink. 

“What?” Zaraki sputtered. “Why the hell would you think that?”

“I know his type: coming in here, feeding you juicy little bits of his history, just to leave you hungry for more. That’s how mysterious men like him reel you in.” 

“I think being an obnoxious mystery is just part of who he is,” Zaraki dismissed, turning back to his work with an amused little scoff. 

“Or maybe Kurotsuchi-san is madly in love with you, and you’re just too blind to see it. Maybe you’re breaking his ugly, black heart by treating him with such apathy.”

“As if he has a heart at all. I don’t think that asshole has ever loved anyone in his entire life.”

It was an instinctive answer, given with neither hesitation nor uncertainty, but the more Zaraki thought of it, the more he began to truly doubt the validity of his own words. After all, if Yachiru was telling the truth – which she always did when she was speaking to him – then Kurotsuchi had a daughter. A little girl that he loved dearly, if the message that he’d delivered with the cake was to be believed. The part of Zaraki that lacked self-control, the part of him that had been infected, perhaps, with just a little bit of Kurotsuchi’s own morbid curiosity, wanted to ask him about her, even when he knew they weren’t nearly close enough to talk about their families or their possible lack thereof. 

It was still difficult for Zaraki to imagine it: a patchwork doll and a little girl, holding hands as they walked through the park. 

A girl with blue hair and piercing golden eyes, just like her father. 

\-------

For the first time in ages, Kurotsuchi didn’t visit during the weekend, and the café seemed almost lifeless due to his absence. Zaraki had almost forgotten how it felt to start off a morning with him. Without that irritating scowl and that whiny voice, complaining about this and that – or more recently, perhaps, feeding him little bits of that juicy mystery that Yumichika so loved to tease him about.

Though he was loath to admit it, Zaraki was almost, just barely, concerned by Kurotsuchi’s absence. After all, for months, now, Kurotsuchi had visited their café like clockwork. A part of him wondered whether the man had simply lost interest in the coffee – and in him – just like he’d said he would, eventually. For some strange reason that Zaraki couldn’t quite pinpoint, that morbid thought left a bitter taste in his mouth: a feeling of abandonment, despite the knowledge that Kurotsuchi didn’t owe him anything at all. Not his companionship and not an ending to his story. When that familiar man walked back through the door on Monday morning, however, Zaraki couldn’t deny that he’d felt a rush of relief wash over him, cool and calm like fresh, spring rain, the prelude to a thunderstorm, certainly.

“Here I thought you got sick and died,” Zaraki scoffed, forcing on a scowl that clashed against the blossoming joy in the pit of his chest, warm and radiant. “That’s too bad. Gotta put away the balloons and streamers.”

Instead of the playful quip or angry outburst he’d expected, however, instead of starting an argument, Kurotsuchi only smiled back at him, golden teeth, shining. 

“I had custody of my daughter over the weekend,” he replied, in a better mood than he’d ever seen him before in the past. “And I was able to find an excuse to take a vacation, for once, which is, perhaps, the true miracle. It was a special event. A rare opportunity. Taking that into account, I wasn’t about to bring her to a dump like this.”

“I wouldn’t say this place a dump, but I get what you’re saying. This ain’t exactly a fun place for kids.” In fact, Yachiru was probably the one and only exception to that rule. “Does your job keep you away from home a lot?” He did miss his daughter’s recital, if Yachiru was to be believed. “What do you do?”

“Oh? You haven’t heard about my accomplishments? How ridiculous. I’d forgotten for a moment that you live under a rock,” Kurotsuchi scoffed, turning his nose up at him like a scorned nobleman. It was fucking infuriating. Zaraki wanted nothing more than to slam his fist against his jaw and send those golden teeth flying. When Kurotsuchi pulled out a business card, Zaraki almost refrained from taking it out of nothing more than spite. It was sleek and minimalistic, entirely black, save for a bit of golden text and a symbol of an encircled thistle, emblazoned right in the middle of the card. “Here,” Kurotsuchi offered, “that should educate you. You should frame it,” Kurotsuchi added with an arrogant little whine that made the suggestion sound more like an order. “I don’t distribute my business card to the common masses very often.”

Though Zaraki wanted nothing more than to crumple up that card and toss it right into the garbage, he couldn’t resist the urge to look. Bringing it up to his face, he squinted, studying the characters.

“Ashisogi Jizō Pharmaceuticals,” he recited in slow, awkward monotone, slowly struggling through the syllables. “Kurotsuchi Mayuri, President & CEO?”

“I’m not quite Jizō Bosatsu, but my medicine can return men from the abyss of death, all the same.” 

“For a price. Right?” Zaraki only half-joked.

“How asinine.” Kurotsuchi almost seemed offended by the thought that he’d offer charity to anyone. How typically him. “Of course there’s a price. Don’t you remember, Zaraki? My faith in the gods in entirely ironic. I may have taken the name of ‘Jizō,’ but I am far from a saint. You have to pay for miracles, nowadays.”

“Guess the rumors are true, then. You must be loaded,” Zaraki remarked, running his calloused fingers against the edges of the card. “That’s pretty good for an ex-con.”

“The money doesn’t interest me,” Kurotsuchi all but agreed, with a glaring absence of enthusiasm. “Not as much as the research, anyway. I am always developing something new. It’s time consuming, I’ll admit, and it leaves me with little opportunity to pursue hobbies, but there is no feeling in the world more satisfying than formulating a miracle drug. I’ve done it once before, in the past. Now, I am on the verge of my next big break. It’s close. I can tell.”

“Damn. The hell am I doing with my life?” Zaraki joked, laughing, as he rubbed his palm against the back of his neck. He wondered if Kurotsuchi could come up with a cure for dandruff next. “You’re almost making me look bad.”

“Don’t let it bother you,” his companion dismissed with an elegant wave of his hand. “We can’t all be brilliant. Little people like you play an essential role in this society, as well. Your presence serves as a reminder of just how far I’ve come from the festering pit of mediocrity.” 

“’Brilliant’ or not,” Zaraki began with scathing sarcasm, “your skull’ll cave in all the same when I slam my fist into your face.”

“Stop posturing. I’ve received far more menacing threats from men twice as intimidating as you are. You don’t frighten me. Not in the slightest.”

Gods, the way Kurotsuchi looked, petulant and proud, with his arms crossed and his nose in the air, his bright eyes, shrewd and narrowed, like a housecat that thought itself a lion. Zaraki’s ears popped from the sheer force that it took to stifling his boiling laughter. Despite the ridiculousness of it all, however, he couldn’t help but find Kurotsuchi’s pride bizarrely endearing. 

“Is that right? I forgot you’re used to violence. Did you actually get pushed around in prison or something?” he half-teased, without truly expecting an honest response.

“I suppose you can say that. It was like high school all over again,” Kurotsuchi grumbled under his breath.

“No kidding?”

“Oh, I am always gravely serious,” Kurotsuchi replied, in a high, lilting tone, the meaning of which Zaraki couldn’t discern. “The similarities were astounding. There were cliques, struggles over social status, arguments, terrible food. Prison was just like high school. Wouldn’t you agree?” 

“To be honest, I don’t know. Never made it that far. I dropped out of school the first chance I got. I was never too book smart,” Zaraki commented, as he started up the old coffee grinder. “I just stopped going one day and never looked back.”

“That’s a shame.” 

Well, that wasn’t the response he was expecting. Peeking out from behind the bar, Zaraki shot his companion an inquisitive look, raised brow and everything, though Kurotsuchi, already typing away on his cellphone, didn’t seem to notice at all. 

“Everyone deserves a proper education,” Kurotsuchi continued. “What subject challenged you the most, if I may ask? Was it calculus or chemistry?”

“Calculus? The hell’re you talking about?” Zaraki sputtered, choking on his own spit. “I couldn’t even pass algebra.”

“I see. That’s unfortunate. If you’ve never so much as mastered algebra, I assume that failure serves a great hindrance to your professional life. Do you still struggle with it, even to this day? If so, I could teach you, sometime, if you’d like.”

Zaraki shot him an incredulous glance. 

“Hold up. Are you serious?” he asked, cradling the precious little cup of coffee in his palms. He’d made sure to select the very best beans for his least favorite customer that morning. 

“Weren’t you listening? I always am,” Kurotsuchi replied in that same, half-mocking tone. “I’ll have you know, I’m quite the proficient professor. In fact, teaching is how I passed the time, when I was in prison.”

“You mean those tutoring programs? Did anyone actually want to learn? Back when I was doing time, everyone was too busy working out and getting into fistfights to spend time in the library.”

“You’d be surprised. I had my fair share of students. It’s not often that a doctor ends up behind bars, after all. It’s a rare opportunity for those who wish to better themselves. One of my pupils, in fact, went on to study chemical engineering at Tokyo University. He was barely literate when we first met, and yet now he’s working towards a doctorate. He still studies under me as an intern, even to this day.”

“And did you do all of that out of the goodness of your heart? No offense, but you don’t look like the type of guy that goes around picking up strays.”

“I don’t believe in charity,” Kurotsuchi answered with a shameless smile. “I wouldn’t have taken him under my wing if I didn’t see a way to benefit from our arrangement. Quid pro quo, and all that. Akon was nothing when we first met. Just another nameless delinquent with no education and no opportunities. I was the one who raised him up. It’s only natural that I remind him of that, every now and again.”

“Akon –” 

It was a familiar name, though Zaraki couldn’t quite say where he’d heard it in the past. 

“You’ll meet him eventually, I’m sure. I let him know about this place, quite a while ago. Hopefully, he’ll deign to pay you a visit. As often as I like to tease, I must admit that this café deserves more business.” 

“Why’s that? Because we support ex-cons? I thought you didn’t care about the cause.”

“I don’t,” Kurotsuchi retorted without missing a beat, just as confident as always. “But I would derive no joy from watching this business fail.”

“That’s charitable of you.”

“I assure you that it isn’t. It’s simply that Akon is not the only one who remembers his debts.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

In response to his curiosity, Kurotsuchi only smiled, calm and expressionless. 

“You severely misjudge our closeness, if you think that I’m about to tell you something like that. I don’t owe you any explanations,” Kurotsuchi teased with a mocking laugh. “We aren’t friends, Zaraki. I come here for the coffee – not your company. Don’t presume that I’m purposefully seeking that.” 

Finishing off the rest of his coffee, Kurotsuchi set the cup right back onto the counter, leaving Zaraki to clean up after his messes, just like he always did. 

“Speaking of your company,” Kurotsuchi continued, already starting to turn and walk away, “I’ve had more enough of the displeasure, for one day. Perhaps I will see you again tomorrow, if I deem myself able to tolerate the torture all over again.”

As the doorbell chimed, signaling the man’s departure, Zaraki wasn’t certain whether to chase after him or yell for that bastard to never come back.


	4. Chapter 4

Zaraki sat, stone still, across the table from Yachiru, and watched in stunned amazement as the little girl devoured twice her weight in pastries and ice cream. Vacuuming it up and smiling while doing it. He wished that he could share even an ounce of her enthusiasm. Her carefree innocence and childish joy. His own piece of cake remained untouched as he chose, instead, to gnaw at the flesh on the inside of his cheek, drawing blood. As if to stop the flow, he pressed his tongue against the tattered ribbons of flesh, though the blood seeped insistently between his teeth all the same, flooding his mouth with the taste of iron.

“Hey,” Zaraki said, breaking the silence with a gentle nudge of his muddy sneaker against Yachiru’s ballet flats. “I need some advice. You got a minute?”

“Huh? You want advice from me?” Yachiru asked, wide-eyed and grinning at the prospect of having the chance to share her wisdom. With pink frosting smeared around her lips and with crumbs dotting her cheeks, Yachiru hardly looked the part of the clever advisor, but she was the closest thing that Zaraki had to family. She _was_ family, and that meant that her opinion mattered, regardless of age or maturity. Plus, it wasn’t like Zaraki’s friends were any better. Ikkaku and Yumichika could barely function as independent adults, considering that they woke up in their bathtubs or in puddles of vomit at least twice a week.

“Yeah. It’s a social question,” Zaraki answered with a casual shrug, “I figure you’d know more about this kind of shit than anyone else I know, with you still being in school. Adults don’t really have to socialize as much as you kids do.”

Though Yachiru always hated to be interrupted mid-feast, to her credit, she put down her fork and wiped the mess from her mouth, ready to play the role of a makeshift counselor. 

“You can ask me anything,” she said with confidence, and Zaraki knew that she spoke the truth. They were as close as a father and child: the genuine article, in everything but name. 

They were special to each other, in a way that other people, perhaps, could never understand. She’d returned his humanity to him, made him feel like a person again – and he’d been her sword and shield when she’d needed it most. That man who had called himself her father, who had smacked her around and spent their food money on booze, ended up in prison, right where he belonged. Yachiru hadn’t felt as though she could trust her teachers with that kind of information – but she knew that she could trust her Ken-chan. Now, years later, even as a happy, healthy foster child, she hadn’t forgotten her old allegiances. 

“Anything?” Zaraki asked with a low chuckle. 

“Anything! Even if it’s really, really embarrassing.”

“It’s pretty damn embarrassing, alright,” he mumbled, which only made Yachiru smile wider. 

“Don’t worry! I won’t tell. I promise. Pinky swear.”

“Fine,” Zaraki relented, as he wove his thick, calloused finger around Yachiru’s. “So, tell me: what do you do if you want to get to know someone better?”

“Who?” she asked, eyes sparkling. “Is it a special lady, Ken-chan? Is it someone you like?” 

“No! Hell no. It’s just a customer,” Zaraki dismissed. “We ain’t friends or anything, but we chat when he stops by for his coffee in the mornings. He’s… I don’t know. Interesting.”

Little hands slammed down against the table, sending dishes and cups clattering against each other in a veritable symphony of raucous sound. A light flashed in her eyes, and the next second, Yachiru was practically shouting at the top of her lungs, crumbs and spittle, flying everywhere.

“You’re talking about _Mayurin_ , aren’t you?! You want to be friends! You want to be friends with –”

“Shut it!” Flying into motion, Zaraki clamped his hand around Yachiru’s mouth and forced her to sit down. He glanced back towards the kitchen, waiting for a full minute, and then almost two, until he became fully reassured that Yumichika and Ikkaku had both truly gone out to lunch, just like they’d said they would. “Those two’ll never let me live it down if they find out I’m curious about that guy.” 

He settled back down, slinking into his chair as he slowly died from shame. 

“How’d you know it was him, anyway?” he asked.

“He’s the only one who comes here, remember? You don’t have any customers!” She practically shouted once again, though a harsh glare from Zaraki set her straight. “I mean… Mayurin’s your only customer,” she whispered, all hush-hush, as Zaraki wiped the frosting residue from the palm of his hand. “I kind of figured, too, because Nemuri said that her dad’s been acting weird lately. The two of them video chat before she goes to bed sometimes, and she said that he told her that he met someone ‘interesting’ at a coffee shop. At first I thought that the ‘interesting person’ was a lady, but it has to be you, Ken-chan! Maybe Mayurin wants to be friends, too.” 

“That’d make things easier,” he said, perking up.

“Maybe. But there’s one thing that kind of confuses me: I thought you didn’t like Mayurin. I thought you said he was mean and annoying.”

“He is. He pisses me off,” Zaraki shook his head. “But when we talk, he says these things sometimes, that sound so… I don’t know –”

“Interesting? Weird?” she asked. “I don’t know: _profound_?”

“Maybe all of those,” Zaraki relented. “He has all these crazy stories about making medicine, and tutoring guys in prison, and it’s like he doesn’t belong in the normal world with all these… boring-ass salarymen and stupid housewives. He’s different. Different like me.” A _reject_ like him. “And I don’t know why, but when he talks, I get the feeling that I could listen for hours. Maybe we always argue, but I have fun doing it. Other than going to the gym, and hanging out with you, talking with Kurotsuchi is probably the most fun I’ve had in a while. But he always leaves right when I’m really getting into the conversation, you know? Says he always has to go to work or whatever. I’m starting to think that’s just an excuse to get away from me.”

“I don’t know. I think he’s telling the truth,” Yachiru commented. She wove a strand of bright pink hair around her finger, twirling it gently in the way she always did while lost in thought. “I don’t really know what Mayurin does for work exactly, but Nemuri that said he’s a really important person. And he works really long hours. Like, sixteen-hour days, twenty days in a row. Sometimes, he’ll even give up his custody days just to work more.”

“You mean he’s choosing not to see his daughter just so he can sit around in an office?”

“Yup. It’s not that he’s trying to give you guys the cold shoulder. That’s just the way he is, I think. When me and Nemuri were working on our science fair project, I asked Mayurin how he got so good at chemistry and stuff, and all he said was that science is ‘the greatest love of his life’ or something weird like that. The weird thing is, I think that means that, to him, friends and family come second. I’m not saying that he doesn’t love Nemuri. He leaves her notes in her lunch, now and then, and he buys her really cool stuff, but I don’t think he’s too good at showing that he actually cares about her.”

Well, that sounded like every stereotypical, ladder-climbing, rat-race running, Japanese father ever. Hardworking and emotionally unavailable, his expectations, high enough to burst through the ceiling and skyrocket up towards the heavens. A father was a distant authority figure who could never be pleased. 

“You think he actually loves her? Really? You kind of make him sound like a robot.”  
“Of course he loves her!” Yachiru scolded, kicking his knee from under the table, doling out punishment on Kurotsuchi’s behalf. “He’s trying his best. It’s just that his best isn’t really all that good. At all. But he’s still trying!”

“You think I should ask him about her? All dads like talking about their daughters, right?”

“Why? Because you like talking about me?” she asked with a playful giggle that died down into a pensive hum. “I don’t know if Mayurin would feel the same way, thugh. He’s kind of private. I don’t think he’d want to talk about Nemuri to someone that he doesn’t know all that well. Maybe if you just started hanging out more first?” she suggested with a shrug. “I try to do that when I want to be better friends with someone at school: I’ll invite them out to get ice cream, or watch a movie, or something. Maybe you can do all of that with Mayurin!” 

Zaraki couldn’t imagine a more ridiculous scenario. That man wouldn’t be caught dead sitting in a movie theater and munching on popcorn and ice cream, of all things. A niggling, forbidden thought nestled in the back of Zaraki’s mind: Kurotsuchi would probably rather kill himself than watch the latest superhero flick. He’d probably sneak out and hang himself in a bathroom stall before the trailers even finished.

“Maybe we’ll just grab a beer.”

“A beer? Ugh. Boys are so boring,” Yachiru whined, resting her head against her folded arms, lain across the table. “Did you listen to anything I just said? Sitting around and drinking beer is boring, Ken-chan! You’ll never make friends like that.” 

“You only think it’s boring because you’re a kid. When you get a little older, you’ll realize that there’s nowhere else you’d rather be than a dark, quiet bar. You’ll put down that ice cream cone and pick up a beer. You’ll see.”

“Ugh. Beer stinks. If all adults like that stuff, I hope I never grow up.”

Though he didn’t say anything at all, in truth, Zaraki felt the exact same way. When the future was so uncertain, at the very least, he wished that he and Yachiru could stay the same, always. But in just a few years, she’d be going off to college, and she would leave him, and their town, and their old life behind. Left in the dust. Looking back at her with a sad, gentle smile, Zaraki made a point to remember the sight of her, then, as she was in that moment. To take that fragile, precious image and tuck it away into the warmest parts of his memory.

“Yeah,” he said, pushing his own plate of cake towards her. “Me too.”

\------

He made a point, that day, of sending Ikkaku and Yumichika out of the café to finish up a list of pointless errands that he’d made up on the spot. It was busywork, really: grabbing beans from the Urahara Shop and dropping off cash at the bank before the lines got too long. By the time that Kurotsuchi stopped by that morning, six o’clock, right on the dot, Zaraki was the only man left in the café, just as planned. A perfect opportunity, all things considered, for him to either play it smooth or make a goddamn fool of himself, depending on nothing more than the gods’ whimsy. The doorbell chimed, and Zaraki perked up, straightening his back and looking up from behind the register.

“Hey, Kurotsuchi,” he greeted with an upwards tilt of his head, the likes of which was never returned. It never was. Kurotsuchi seemed more like the type of man to bow and exchange business cards, anyway – or the type to flip someone off, showcasing that gods-awful, massive fingernail if someone so much as looked at him funny. 

“Zaraki,” he greeted half-heartedly, already playing on his phone.

“You want the usual?”

“I always do.”

Kurotsuchi didn’t say anything more. He didn’t have to. A credit card thrown onto the countertop completed their transaction and the gentle hum of machinery soon followed the silence. There was a calming peace in their simple routine. A familiarity in the structure, just like clockwork. 

Breaking habit, however, instead of focusing in on his work, Zaraki indulged his curiosity, glancing away from the machines, for a moment, to allow his single eye a moment to roam over the man before him. Taking in the sight of Kurotsuchi’s black kimono and flowing, white haori, his strange, little hat, asymmetrically high fashion, fresh off the runway. It was a violent collision of worlds, traditional and modern, stiff and abstract. Kurotsuchi had shaved his hair into a styled blue mohawk of all things, and though it made for a ghastly sight, Zaraki couldn’t help but find it charming, regardless. It suited him, in a way – youthful, despite his age. A rebel without a cause. How typically Kurotsuchi.

“You doin’ anything after work, today?” Zaraki asked with a practiced, neutral expression that effectively hid the anxious racing of his heartbeat. “I was thinking maybe we could grab a beer. Live it up a little, you know?”

He’d half expected a flat-out rejection – either that, or an assault of relentless laughter. But instead, yellow eyes shooting up and away from his phone screen, Kurotsuchi looked back at him like a deer in the headlights. 

“What?” he asked, clearly caught off guard. Their eyes met only for a moment before he quickly glanced away, shifting his line of sight over Zaraki’s shoulder. 

“I… asked if you wanted to grab a beer after work,” he repeated, and all the color drained from Kurotsuchi’s face.

“Oh. Well, I… I don’t drink,” he muttered, tilting down the rim of his hat, as though to hide in its shadow.

“You’re kidding,” Zaraki replied, stifling a laugh. He drew closer, leaning over the counter. “No offense or anything, but I kind of thought you’d be a party animal. It’s the makeup and the mohawk.”

“Those are only fashion statements. They don’t imply anything about my character,” Kurotsuchi replied, strangely awkward as he steepled his fingers. “To be honest, if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s parties. I was never invited to anything like that during my college days – nor would I have attended, even if I had been. I was far too focused on my studies, my future, to waste a single second mingling with vapid man-children, obsessed with the media and modern culture, who’ve never generated a single independent thought in their entire lives.”

There was quite a bit of hostility in his voice. It was probably a nerd vs. jock kind of thing.

“So, you went to university, but you never partied? Not even once?”

“I’d never had any interest in it.”

“And you never even drank?”

“I never said that,” Kurotsuchi grumbled. “I have. I simply haven’t done so in quite a long time.”

“Why’s that? You tryin’ to turn over a new leaf in your old age? Start working out and eating healthy like all the other tired, middle-aged guys?”

Not like living a healthy lifestyle would help him, at that point. Kurotsuchi the ragdoll was already falling apart at the seams. He really did have missing ears – Zaraki could see the scars – and he’d counted at least four gold teeth since the time they’d started speaking to each other in earnest.

“Not quite.” Kurotsuchi seemed to hesitate, for a moment, before providing any details. Almost as though he were debating, internally, whether Zaraki could be trusted with any further information. “It’s… more or less due to the circumstances surrounding my arrest, if you simply must know.”

“Oh yeah?” Zaraki asked, feigning his usual, casual tone, even when he had no idea what the hell Kurotsuchi was talking about. 

“What’s with that silent stupor?” Kurotsuchi hissed, scowling at him. “You read through my files, didn’t you? You should already be familiar enough with the topic.”

Zaraki sighed, scratching deep, red lines into his razor-burned neck. 

“No, I didn’t read shit. To be honest, I never even scrolled past your mugshot,” he confessed. “I looked at your photo for maybe two seconds before I closed the window. You just looked so goddamn sad, I couldn’t –” He shook his head, cutting himself off. It was one thing to be caught with his pants down; it was another thing, entirely, to explain himself afterwards. “I didn’t want to see it. It was like watching those animal abuse commercials during the holidays, you know? I always change the channel. It’s too depressing for me to watch. I felt the same way, looking at your mugshot: like I was intruding in your personal life. Trampling over something kind of… fragile. You know? I didn’t want to do you dirty by reading up on everything you did, on top of that.”

Kurotsuchi let out a stuttered, breathy sigh; it took Zaraki a moment to realize it was laughter. 

Silent, muted laughter. 

“Is that what you think of me?” Kurotsuchi asked with a cruel, sardonic smile. “I’m not a wounded dog, awaiting some kind of rescue. Though it’s interesting, in a way: you aren’t the first person who’s thought as much. I wonder if that’s the impression that I gave off, as a young man. It seems that it was enough to fool you, anyway. As helpless as I may have appeared, I assure you, I was always dangerous.”

“You’re always saying that. What do you mean you’re ‘dangerous?’” Zaraki asked, leaning in closer. “You talking about your murder conviction? You know, I still can’t believe you killed a man. Twiggy guy like you? Can’t even see you getting into a fistfight.” 

“It wasn’t a fight, Zaraki,” he clarified, before going silent. Kurotsuchi didn’t speak for the longest time; he simply ran his nail against the curve of his false beard – golden, just like his eyes. “You honestly don’t know anything? You haven’t read any of the articles? You haven’t heard any of the rumors?”

“Nothing other than what you and Yachiru told me.”

He seemed satisfied by that answer, his posture, softening, as he visibly let out a breath that he must have been holding for the past minute. Zaraki watched, silent, as Kurotsuchi’s painted finger slid across the screen of his phone, powering it down. As he slipped it into his pocket, he took a glance over Zaraki’s side, through the little window leading into the kitchen. 

“Where are your subordinates?” he asked suddenly, searching the café for signs of life.

“Subordinates?” he scoffed. That was a term that he didn’t hear often. “You mean Yumichika and Ikkaku? They’re out running errands.”

“I see. That will do.”

Before Zaraki could ask why it mattered, Kurotsuchi had already turned on his heel, walking towards the door and flipping over the open sign, closing the café for business. They never had any other customers, and yet Kurotsuchi didn’t seem to want to take the risk. It was an act, strangely befitting of him. The careful type. Thorough and cautious.

After glancing into the kitchen one last time, Kurotsuchi took a tentative seat at the bar. Zaraki couldn’t help but follow. He didn’t know what had him so entranced: the mystery – or the strange scent of Kurotsuchi’s cologne. Warm, and dark, and musky. It reminded him of a pharaoh’s tomb, with all of the glory, the death and the austerity. Honey sweet and bitter as venom. He served him a cup of coffee that Kurotsuchi didn’t bother to touch.

“I suppose that I should be relieved that you know so little,” Kurotsuchi said to him, suddenly, in a voice so smooth and low that Zaraki questioned whether he’d heard it at all. “It’s better for you to hear the truth from me, perhaps, rather than for you to discover it elsewhere. From a police officer or from something as cold and impartial as a court document. They always paint these kinds of issues in stark black and white, when reality is, in fact more akin to shades of grey. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Kurotsuchi chuckled softly, swirling his coffee, before taking a sip. Zaraki hadn’t realized, until that moment, that Kurotsuchi was wearing lipstick. It was a subtle, darker shade, smeared onto the rim of his coffee cup. Zaraki’s eyes focused in, and he felt his chest tighten. He blinked hard, shaking off its influence and forcing himself back into reality. 

“You don’t have to tell me what happened if you don’t want to,” he reiterated, but Kurotsuchi only shook his head.

“No. You’ll find out eventually. The people in my social circle always do; it is only a matter of how and when. I don’t usually get the luxury of controlling that,” he shrugged, looking like a perfect bronze idol, sitting on its podium, with his legs crossed and his arms folded gently on his lap. He was too delicate for a man. Too small and fragile. 

“Well then, out with it,” Zaraki quipped, trying his best to lighten to mood. “So, who’d you kill? Someone important?” 

“Nobody is important. Nobody,” Kurotsuchi corrected with a tense waggle of his painted finger. His expression, unreadable, Kurotsuchi took a deep breath, then, looking back at him with a strange smile, distant and cold. “‘A man’s fifty years, when held to the heavens, are no more than a transient dream,’” he recited, surprisingly poetic, for a man as cynical as he was. “Do you recognize that quote? It is a passage from _Atsumori_ ,” he continued, without waiting for an answer. “It implies that we, as men, are insignificant. The passing of five decades feels so long, but, when put into perspective, when contrasted with the timeline of the world’s history, a human life begins and ends within the work of a moment. Some of us may shape nations and cultures within those brief lifetimes, but billions of years from now, when the stars burn out and the universe goes dark, even the greatest of our accomplishments will have amounted to nothing. We are insignificant. Death comes for all of us.”

“Nobody is important,” Zaraki parroted.

“Right. Even I am unimportant, in the end. Knowing that, all I’d ever wanted to do was to burn as brightly as I could for the short time that I had been granted and to go out like a supernova. Nothing had ever meant anything to me, other than the pursuit of that goal. The pursuit of scientific advancement. Not until the day that I first held my daughter, anyway. She, like everybody else, was not particularly significant, in the grand scheme of things. She was nobody. Nothing. But she was important to me. I simply didn’t realize that until the day that she died.”

Zaraki stilled for a moment and let the words sink in. Kurotsuchi could be painfully blunt, at times, and yet there were moments like those, when everything he said seemed to elude Zaraki’s understanding. There were concepts he’d never considered, philosophies he’d never encountered – a bizarre sense of sentimentality that clashed against everything he knew about the man. 

“What’re you saying? Did something happen to Nemuri?” 

“No,” Kurotsuchi clarified with a strange lilt in his voice. From the corner of his eye, Zaraki watched as Kurotsuchi dragged his fingertip against his coffee cup, digging a deep, stark indent into the styrofoam. A gentle smile spread across his face, and Kurotsuchi closed his eyes, as pensive and still as Jizō Bosatsu. “The daughter of whom I speak, the daughter that I killed, was Nemuri’s sister. I killed my daughter. It’s been years since she passed, but even as the days go by, it never gets any easier to admit that,” he said, suddenly, and a strange tightness worked its way into his jaw, creaking the joints, the bone and the metal. It was the first visible sign of genuine emotion that he’d ever seen from the man, and it was gone as quickly as it came. His expression fell back to neutrality, his eyes, unblinking, though there was a strength, a passion, in his voice that set Zaraki’s heart racing. “Science was the first great love of my life,” he said. “Nemu was the second. Being her father was like…”

He shook his head and smiled. 

“It was like a dream,” he said. “Like walking blindly through a waking dream. It was surreal. An unimaginable joy. I never wanted to wake up.”

“If you loved her so much, then why’d you kill her? Was it an accident?” Zaraki asked, clumsy and awkward, more accustomed to raunchy jokes than heartfelt confessions.

“No,” Kurotsuchi shrugged, letting a single shoulder roll back. “An accident implies that no party can be blamed for the events that unfurled. But I accept responsibility. If I hadn’t been such a fool at the time, if I’d been smarter, or stronger, or more capable, perhaps, than it wouldn’t have happened. You see, I was working as a surgeon, at the time that Nemu was born,” Kurotsuchi sighed, drifting off to some kind of odd, non-sequitur that Zaraki couldn’t quite follow. It seemed improper, however, to redirect him as he was, sitting so close, with distant expression. “I dedicated my life to that job, though for poor reasons, admittedly, that caused quite a bit of hardship for my family. I didn’t become a doctor to take care of my patients or to serve my community. I did it out of a sense of… morbid curiosity. I wanted to take things apart and stitch them back together again. I wanted to play at being like the gods in whom I have never believed, using methods that hadn’t been approved. Experimental drug combinations that I wanted to test. I was the finest surgeon at that hospital, and even though my patients had a high survival rate regardless of my methods, when the hospital caught wind of what I was doing, I found myself in the midst of a malpractice suit. I lost my job, and my license, and everything that went with it. Riches to rags in under a year. After everything I’d sacrificed for that job, I took my fall from glory about as well as you would predict. Nemu was one of the two great loves of my life, and yet I took out all of my anger and my hatred out on her. I’d never been as patient with her as I should have been, but my mistreatment of her only escalated after I’d lost my license. I will admit that I often lost my temper. Any other child would have resented me for that, but Nemu... I could never do any wrong in her eyes. She was a daddy’s girl, you know, though, even to this day, I can’t imagine why. I don’t know what she ever saw in me.” 

As unbelievable as it was, however, at that moment, standing over Kurotsuchi as he stared down at the curling steam, rising from his coffee cup, Zaraki felt as though he’d understood, at that moment, some semblance of what this ‘Nemu’ must have admired about him. Kurotsuchi was not a kind man. He was selfish, and opportunistic, and even the death of a child hadn’t changed that fundamental part of him. But he was clever and pensive, insightful in a way that others weren’t. It elevated him above other people, and Zaraki couldn’t help but think that Kurotsuchi was just a little closer to that coveted distinguishment of godhood than the man, himself, had realized. 

“The day she died…” Kurotsuchi closed his eyes, as though trying to recall the memory and bring it back to life. “It was on the night before I’d made the appointment to sell off my Bentley. It was only a machine, but I was so proud of that car. I named it Ashisogi Jizō and fiddled with the mechanics until it was something of my own creation. It was my first major purchase after graduating medical school. The thought of losing it pained me more than it logically should have. Knowing that I would never see it again, I’d wanted to use it one last time. That night, Nemu could smell the sake on my breath, I’m sure. On my way out the door, she begged me to reconsider, but I shoved her aside and ordered her to leave me be. She always surrendered when I put up a fight, but on that night, she disobeyed. She hadn’t wanted to leave me on my own. Even though she knew that it was dangerous, she followed me into the garage and slid into the passenger’s seat. The rest, as they say, is history.”

Zaraki didn’t realize, until he felt the splinters digging in beneath his nails, that he was pressing his fingers into the wooden bar table. He pulled his hand away as quickly as he could – and he was grateful that Kurotsuchi hadn’t seemed to notice. As fearless as ever, that man never broke eye contact, his gaze, steady and calm. Perhaps if Zaraki were less of himself and more like the woman whose name he’d taken, if he had only a fraction of her poise and her wisdom, then perhaps he would have known what clever combination of words could bring both himself and Kurotsuchi some semblance of peace. Instead, tongue turned to lead, Zaraki said nothing at all, looking back at the abyss, bright gold. 

“I don’t know what happened after that. Not really. Everything I heard is just a secondhand account, summarized in court documents and medical records. According to the files, I’d lost control of the car and slammed it against the entrance to the old Pernida Church and was knocked unconscious the moment we made impact. Out like a light. But Nemu still had her wits about her, despite her injuries. It was a massive wreck; the car was on fire. We both would have burned to death if we hadn’t gotten out of there. I didn’t have the means to escape on my own, so, bleeding and broken, my daughter clawed her way out of that deathtrap, stumbled to the driver’s side door, and dragged me from the burning wreck and out into the field. She was only fourteen years old at the time. I was quite a bit larger than her, but somehow, she still managed. It’s the strangest thing,” Kurotsuchi mused, with a curious, breathy sigh, as he took off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair. His entire body seemed to deflate from the weight of that breath, letting his eyes fall closed as he leaned his weight against the table. “Nemu was already teetering on the brink of death, bleeding internally from a fracture in her skull, and all I’d suffered was a concussion, burns, and a missing ear. Yet I was the one who needed rescuing. It wasn’t until I’d woken up in a hospital room, some hours later, that the nurses informed me of what had happened, and that Nemu had passed away while I slept.”

Zaraki felt a cold sweat beading out from the back of his neck. His mouth went dry and his fingers curled, and he couldn’t say a single word. Not for lack of wanting, but for a simple lack of ability. Brutish as he was, it wasn’t often that anyone ever trusted a man like him with a testimony quite as sentimental as that. No, that absolute, implicit faith was better entrusted to a person far more worthy of it. A person like Unohana, whose shoes he still couldn’t fill, even after all that time. Zaraki didn’t have a doubt in his mind that she would have known just what to say in that moment, and in just the right tone. In contrast to her wisdom, all Zaraki could do was flounder. 

“Why are you telling me any of this?”

“It’s like I said before,” Kurotsuchi replied with another infuriatingly dismissive, one-shouldered shrug, as he readjusted his hat, letting a dark shadow fall over his face. “You would have uncovered what had happened, eventually. At the very least, by telling you myself, I can ensure that what you hear is the truth. And the truth is that I am responsible for my daughter’s death. I know it, I accept it, but I refuse to dwell upon it any longer. Even if others expect some great display of repentance out of me, I’m not about to devote myself to a monastery just to make up for what I’ve done. I want to move on with my life. I want to be successful. If that makes me the devil, then so be it. I still have my own ambitions to fulfill, and I don’t intend to let regret and guilt get in the way of that,” Kurotsuchi continued, glancing up at him with that strange, unblinking glare. He held his gaze for what felt like hours before he slowly closed his eyes and turned away. “Just because I have chosen to let go of my daughter, however, does not imply, even for a moment, that I have forgotten. I wanted you to know that, regardless of what anyone else will try to tell you.”

“Is that what people say about you? That you don’t give a damn about what happened?”

“I understand why they do it,” Kurotsuchi replied, strangely logical. His monotone voice, his steady movements, clashed against such a tempestuous mood. “I was never prone to sentimentalism; I didn’t play the part of the grieving father particularly well. I didn’t meet society’s standards, anyway. I simply never saw the point of funerals and elegies when they don’t serve any practical purpose. Modern ceremonies aren’t like the death rites of Ancient Egypt. If they were more similar, perhaps I would have seen a reason to attend Nemu’s funeral,” Kurotsuchi scoffed, crossing his arms. “The ritual of mummification was conceived as a way for human beings to break the chains of their own mortality. The preservation of the body, the ‘ha,’ was meant to give stability and longevity to the spiritual ‘ka,’ tethering the soul to the waking world and granting one the gift eternal life. There’s no logic behind the ritual, of course, but I can still appreciate the beauty. A final attempt to defy fate: there is a certain, somber dignity in that, or so I’ve always believed. In contrast, the only purpose of a modern funeral is to offer the living an acceptable moment to wallow in their own misery. Modern funerals are for the living – not the dead. It’s all so shallow, isn’t it? It’s _pathetic_. Isn’t it? I understand how my absence must have been interpreted, but I couldn’t bring myself to take part in that farce. If others would assume the worst of me because of that decision, then so be it.” 

“Look, I get that you didn’t want to ‘compromise your beliefs’ or whatever,” Zaraki sputtered, “but are you really okay with letting other people think you’re a monster? Are you okay with people thinking you’re a bad dad that didn’t give a shit about his own flesh and blood?”

“Frankly, Zaraki, I couldn’t care less. The opinions of others have never interested me. Not usually, anyway. I suppose that makes yours a bit of a unique case, in that regard.”

In that moment, Zaraki’s mind rushed into a whirlwind, jumping to a thousand baseless conclusions – that Kurotsuchi cared how he felt and how he perceived him. That he valued his company and wanted them to grow closer. Zaraki wanted confirmation of that fact. 

“What do you mean?”

In response to his question, Kurotsuchi only smiled, sly and enigmatic. It was a barely perceptible tug at the corners of his lips, made noticeable only by the subtle wrinkle of the crow’s feet around his eyes. Folding his painted hands in his lap, Kurotsuchi took a deep breath.

Before he could say a single word, however, the front door slammed open, breaking his silence. The welcome bells jostled, a bright and turbulent cacophony – 

And Kurotsuchi turned away.

Ikkaku’s cheerful voice echoed from the front of the store.

“Hey, Boss!” he shouted. “No wonder this place is always empty. You forgot to flip over the open sign!”

Sauntering closer, Ikkaku glanced over towards Zaraki’s isolated corner of the bar, suddenly, and all at once, his flapping tongue was stunned to stillness. He took one look at the two of them, his boss and his least favorite customer, huddled together over a cup of coffee, and he froze, mid-step. Every muscle tensed and stiffened. Zaraki could practically see the nervous sweat, beading up against his shining forehead. For a moment, nobody said a single word. Nobody made a move, until Kurotsuchi reached for his coffee and slipped off the barstool. 

“I should go,” he said suddenly, all without warning.

“Hey, wait!” Zaraki shouted, far louder than he’d intended. He corrected himself quickly, shaking his head as if to ward off his own embarrassment. “You don’t have to leave,” he repeated with far more composure. “You paid for a drink. You can stay here as long as you want.”

“That won’t be necessary.”

Ignoring Zaraki’s fumbling blathering, Kurotsuchi turned away, leaving him behind and walking towards the exit. Almost instinctively, fearing that nearly palpable aura of malice, Ikkaku jolted back, scampering into the corner of the room to make way for His Inglorious Majesty. Dismissive as ever, Kurotsuchi stalked right past him without casting a single glance in his direction. When he reached for the door, however, instead of leaving swiftly as he’d announced, Kurotsuchi hesitated. His hand lay gently on the handle, his thumb, stroking pensively against the edge – and he turned back, glancing at Zaraki with a steady, unreadable expression, masked by the shadow of his hat.

“Thank you for the coffee.”

A jolt of something close to longing twisted sharply in the pit of stomach. Zaraki’s muscles twitched, struggling against the urge to drop his equipment and jump over the counter just to stop him from leaving.

But Kurotsuchi was out the door as quickly as he came. Though a void of silence followed his absence, with the memory of Kurotsuchi’s voice, the scent of his cologne, flooding through the recesses of Zaraki’s memory, a comforting warmth settled deep within his bones, and his vision blurred, his body, leaning against sticky mahogany, melding into the countertops. 

Only Ikkaku’s voice, feigning good cheer above his trembling uncertainty, snapped Zaraki out of his hazy reverie. 

“Did I just interrupt something?” he asked.

“No,” Zaraki said after a moment’s pause, his eyes, transfixed on the polished, glass door. Though the air conditioner had been broken for weeks, goosebumps rose upon his skin. “It’s nothing.”


	5. Chapter 5

The owner of their humble café was a bit of an odd bird: one who stopped back at the nest to roost only once, perhaps twice in a month, if that. He was a familiar, friendly face. A casual, household name that almost everybody in their part of the city recognized, from either his bustling corner convenience store or his not-so-well-known café, but Zaraki didn’t know of a single person who really knew anything about the man. Nothing personal, anyway. It seemed almost as though nobody had ever spoken to him about anything more casual than women or the weather. 

Urahara didn’t seem like a person with a lot of depth, and he never bothered to challenge that preconception. He seemed content to settle for shallow pleasantries. It wasn’t until recently that Zaraki had begun to question whether something lay beneath that casual façade. 

After all, Urahara was a man who knew Kurotsuchi – and if there was anything that Zaraki had learned through their conversations, it was that all things associated with that man were nothing if not complicated. 

It was just as Yumichika claimed. Every so often, Zaraki had seen them chat outside the store, or trade glances in passing: Urahara’s, a casual wink, and Kurotsuchi’s, a hard, paralyzing glare. As directionless, as casual, as utterly _dull_ as Urahara appeared, the fact remained that Kurotsuchi had still deemed him worthy enough of his attention. That fact served as reason enough for Zaraki, himself, to dig deeper, if only to grow just a little closer to their mysterious, mutual acquaintance. 

“Morning, Zaraki-san!” Urahara greeted with a cheerful, lopsided smile, as he made his way behind the counter. “Ready for another wonderful day at the happiest place on Earth?”

Instead of giving his usual response to Urahara’s pointless inquiries – a gruff, terse grunt and a dismissive shake of his head – Zaraki set down the drawer he’d been counting and gave the man his full attention. It was a change in demeanor that Urahara hadn’t missed. The man seemed to pause mid-step, peering at him with a curious look in his eye, bright and probing, even beneath the shade of his worn, striped hat. Zaraki gave him a one-shouldered shrug.

“What’s so ‘happy’ about it?”

“Someone’s grumpier than usual this morning,” Urahara remarked, his body language, open and friendly, even when his smile failed to reach his eyes. It was a strange trait that he shared with Kurotsuchi: an ability to smile without smiling. “Is everything alright?” 

“Yeah. It’s probably fine. I was just thinking about one of the regulars. He always stops by at six, but he didn’t show up this morning. He’s a businessman. It ain’t like he needs me to hold his fucking hand, but he said something yesterday that made me think that –” Zaraki paused for a moment, forcibly silencing himself. Though Kurotsuchi hadn’t exactly sworn him into secrecy, Zaraki felt, in a way, that disclosing Kurotsuchi’s secrets would have felt just the same as slipping a knife into his back. There was a solidarity between them. An unspoken trust that Zaraki did not intend to betray. “Hell, I don’t know. I guess some of the things he said made me wonder whether he’s okay. It ain’t like me to waste my time thinking about other people, but I’m worried about him.”

“A morning regular?” Urahara mused, pensively stroking at his stubbled chin. “You aren’t talking about Kurotsuchi-san, are you?”

Who else? Some days, he was literally the only customer. 

“Huh. So, you know him, after all.” 

It was a rhetorical question, awaiting only confirmation. Crossing his arms and standing tall, Zaraki cut quite the imposing figure. He towered over Urahara even in his geta. To his credit, Urahara seemed unfazed by his intimidation tactics, grinning as easily and shallowly as ever. 

“As well as anyone can hope to get to know him, I guess. Kurotsuchi-san’s not exactly the social type. It’s not always easy to talk with him.”

Oh, how accurate a statement that was. Kurotsuchi was precisely the type of man that people had to “deal with” or “tolerate.” He wasn’t exactly anyone’s idea of a good social partner.

“Either way,” Urahara continued, “there’s no need to worry about him. He’s fine,” he chuckled, scratching awkwardly at the back of his neck with his dirty, untrimmed fingernails. “It’s actually kind of funny that you’d mention him. I saw him on the street this morning. Kurotsuchi-san was glued to his phone, just like he always is, but the minute he glanced up, and our eyes met, he just… stopped in his tracks. And he looked up at me with the meanest, ugliest scowl plastered on his face, and he turned right around and stormed off. Crossed the street and everything, just to get away from me.” 

Urahara’s laughter, shaking with likely feigned embarrassment, softly died down into a deep and weary breath, rising up like smoke from the depths of the earth. Though Zaraki was never quite the perceptive type, he could sense the concern in Urahara’s voice, the longing, the fondness, and all the other softer emotions that men so often feared, melded only with an old and bitter disappointment. When Urahara next spoke, his voice, barely any louder than a whisper, carried a crushing, mournful weight. 

“I think that Kurotsuchi-san tries to avoid this place when he knows I’m here.” 

“That’s what I don’t get: are you guys friends or not? Kurotsuchi’s paying you under the table so you can keep this place in business, right? That’s what Yumichika thinks, anyway.” And it was what Zaraki was beginning to think. It wasn’t like their failing café brought in any money on its own merit. “And it ain’t like I can think of any other reason you’d be clinging onto Kurotsuchi’s ankles every time you see him.”

Any other man would have been dismayed at the mere mention of such a scandal, but Urahara, fool that he was, only ever laughed it off, head in the clouds, as carefree as ever.

“Oh-ho! Are you three gossiping about me? That’s rude you know!”

“Maybe people wouldn’t talk if you weren’t so damn shady,” Zaraki retorted, dropping all pretenses of courtesy.

“There’s nothing suspicious about me! Or about Kurotsuchi-san, for that matter,” Urahara immediately dismissed with a casual wave of his hand. “All we ever do is talk. There’s no money changing hands. No threats. I just like to catch up with an old – well, maybe not a friend, but something close to that – now and then. I like to see how Kurotsuchi-san is doing, how things are going with his daughter, things like that. You know, the two of us actually go way back. A long time ago, before I ran this café and the Urahara Shop, Kurotsuchi-san and I actually worked together, for a bit.” 

“Doing what? Kurotsuchi used to be a surgeon,” Zaraki added, entirely skeptical. “You tellin’ me you worked in the same hospital? What the hell did a bum like you do there? Maintenance? Cleaning bed pans?”

“Hey! Those are important jobs, you know. The workers on the bottom line are the ones who really keep the hospitals running,” Urahara mockingly scolded, playing high and mighty. “Regardless, I’m surprised that Kurotsuchi-san told you about that job. Here I thought he was just another customer to you, but you actually know him quite well, don’t you?”

Zaraki paused for a moment, his expression darkening. 

“We talk.”

“Ah, but that’s exactly how I know you’re close,” Urahara quipped back, firing his finger guns with an audible click of his tongue. “Kurotsuchi-san doesn’t ‘talk’ with people very often, you know.”

“Wouldn’t say we’re close. We just talk about the old days. There’s a kind of mutual understanding between ex-cons, you know? It ain’t nothin’ more than that.”

“You know that he was a convict?” Urahara stammered, sincerely caught off guard for the first time during their conversation. “So, he even trusted you enough to tell you about his arrest. Color me surprised.”

“And how the hell do _you_ know about that? Can’t imagine Kurotsuchi would ever tell a flakey guy like you anything.” Zaraki countered, though Urahara took his aggression in stride. Scratching at his tangled hair, the scruffy, old bastard leaned up against the counter, resting his hip on the edge. Zaraki was half-tempted to shove him off. “You go snoopin’ through his arrest records to find that out?”

“You make me sound so sinister,” Urahara sighed, with a dramatically despondent, playful shake of his head. “It’s nothing like that. Like I said, Kurotsuchi-san and I worked together, for a time. It’s only natural that we should know a thing or two about each other, right? I know that I don’t look like much, now, but I was actually the president of that little company he’s running, back when he first came on board.”

“Bullshit,” Zaraki shot back without missing a beat. “A flaky guy like you can’t the president of anything more important than a manga fanclub.”

“Ouch…” Urahara chuckled, sucking in a harsh, pained hiss through clenched teeth. He drew back as though physically wounded, though in the end, chuckling softly, he only shrugged. “Well, I can see why you’d have your doubts. I’m not saying that I ever accomplished anything as grand as Kurotsuchi-san has. I’m just trying to say that I laid the groundwork. The company was just a little startup when I took it over, but Kurotsuchi-san’s the reason why it’s not so little now. I may have started the project, but he’s really the one who made it into what it is today.” 

As funny and kind as Urahara could be, he’d always struck Zaraki as the type of man who didn’t particularly care about anything. He was overly nonchalant. Never too deeply involved in much of anything. But when he spoke of Kurotsuchi in that moment, his voice shook with fondness, of deep admiration. It struck Zaraki like a bullet in the back. 

Urahara sighed, shaking his head as though admonishing himself. 

“I never had any real ambition,” Urahara said. “No plans for the future, you know? I didn’t care whether I lived like a king or a beggar, so long as I was happy. I still don’t. But Kurotsuchi-san – he’s one of those type A personalities. You know what I mean? He’s the type of guy who has to do something with his life. He just… got caught up in circumstances that made him lose his confidence for a while, when he was younger. I let him lean on me for a bit when he first started his parole, but the rest, building up his company, coming up with that miracle drug, was all on him. Really, I was just a steppingstone. That’s all I ever will be to him. Kurotsuchi-san is moving up.”

For a moment, stunned by the affection in Urahara’s tone, every bit as subtle as a tidal wave, Zaraki couldn’t say a single word. Though he wasn’t particularly well versed in romance, or empathy, or the ‘softer’ side of man, even Zaraki could realize that feelings as warm and sincere as those that Urahara had for Kurotsuchi came only once, perhaps twice in a lifetime. 

“Is that why he comes here?” Zaraki asked, finally, breaking the silence. “He’s always complaining about the coffee, but when I tell him there are other cafés, he never wants to go to them. Does Kurotsuchi keep coming here because you’re the one that owns this place? Does it do it for you?”

That recognition, admitting the possibility of it, seemed to elicit an unrecognizable emotion deep inside of him. Zaraki didn’t have a name for it; he just couldn’t find the words. The cold sensation of pins and needles, shuddering down his spine, the weight in his chest, sucking the air from his lungs. The twisting nausea in the pit of his stomach. It was the same way he’d felt as a boy, all those years ago, sitting in the back of a police car for the very first time. Helpless. Trapped. Feeling his future getting torn away from him. 

“I doubt it,” Urahara replied, shaking his head. “Kurotsuchi-san was never the sentimental type. No matter how much he complains, I really do think he only comes here for the coffee. That would be very much like him, anyway. Doing the strangest things, on nothing more than a whim. Yeah. It’s a very ‘Kurotsuchi’ kind of attitude,” he chuckled, with an embarrassed smile. “He definitely doesn’t come here for me – that’s for sure. I’ve always thought very highly of Kurotsuchi-san, but I’m pretty sure that sentiment’s not about to be returned anytime soon. I didn’t exactly meet him when he was at his best, after all. I think that maybe Kurotsuchi-san is a little embarrassed about that.”

“You mean he’s embarrassed that you knew him when he was fresh out of prison?”

Urahara went quiet for a moment, and his cheerful smile wavered, morphing into a still and unreadable neutrality eerily similar to that of another man whom Zaraki knew. 

“To be honest, Zaraki-san,” he began, every syllable, slow and pensive, “I don’t know if I should tell you the details or not. As much as I like to tease him, it’s not like I purposefully want to step on Kurotsuchi-san’s toes. I owe him more than that. I owe him quite a bit, actually.”

“Sounds more like he’s the one that owes you, if you helped him get back on his feet again.”

“That’s what most people would think, right?” Urahara asked, a strange slyness, glinting brightly in his eyes. “But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Not in the grand scheme of things. See, when I was younger, I didn’t really care about anything. I just wanted to have a good time, all the time. I didn’t realize what was important in my life – I didn’t think _anything_ was important, but Kurotsuchi-san changed all of that. He changed me. I’m not saying that I didn’t care what happened to other people at all, but Kurotsuchi-san was the first person that I ever really wanted to… protect. You know what I mean?”

No. He really didn’t. Zaraki didn’t understand a goddamn word – but he could feel the endless fondness in Urahara’s voice, warm, and soft, and wretched. 

“I wanted to go the extra mile for him. I wanted to make him happy,” Urahara continued. “I wanted to see him smiling. Having fun. I just didn’t realize, at first, how hard that was going to be. When I was younger, things always had a way of working out for me, so I didn’t have to put much effort into anything back then. Trying to support Kurotsuchi-san was the first time in my life that I realized that wasn’t going to happen. He was in a very bad place, at the time. He wasn’t just going to have a personal revelation and get better, all on his own, like some other people do. I was going to have to step up and become someone he could depend on, or he’d crumble. The prison sent him to me through a little work program they set up, where they sent prisoners out to regain work experience in their fields before their release dates. I only agreed to foster Kurotsuchi-san on a whim. Bringing him onto the team was only supposed to be a little pet project that I’d drop when I lost interest, just like I did with everything else – but when I saw him, I… I don’t know. Watching him step out of that prison bus with those bruises on his face and with all those missing teeth. It was painful. He didn’t say a word, and no matter what I said to him, he just wouldn’t look at me. That was the first time I began to reconsider what I wanted to do with him.”

“Really? I ain’t calling you a liar, but it’s hard to think of him like that,” Zaraki admitted. It was hard to reconcile the mental image of the timid, young man in Kurotsuchi’s mugshot photo with the Kurotsuchi that Zaraki knew so well. “I can’t imagine him being broken down like that when he’s such a –” 

‘Raging asshole’ was the first phrase that came to mind, and it was only through a veritable miracle that Zaraki held his tongue. 

“Such a big personality,” Zaraki stated instead. 

“He was a ‘big personality,’ even back then,” Urahara laughed, his tone, lost between joyful nostalgia and solemnity. “Kurotsuchi-san is a man who can start a fight over anything. Even something as ridiculous as which of my assistants, at the time, had more authority in the lab, or which one of them could recite the most digits of pi by memory. Sometimes, it didn’t even have to be verbal. Even if he just cracked a beaker, or if he thought someone looked at him the wrong way, he’d have a meltdown and fly into a rage, like he always does. Screaming, and cursing, and breaking all the glassware he could get his hands on.” 

Now that sounded more like the Kurotsuchi he knew.

“That doesn’t really like the kind of prisoner that belongs in a work program,” Zaraki commented, off-handedly. “Sounds more like the kind of guy that ends up in solitary. I’m surprised you didn’t send him back with a black mark on his report.”

“Oh, I don’t deny that. Kurotsuchi-san had serious anger issues. He spent a lot of time in solitary, back when he was in prison. I really should’ve told the guards to take him back, but the weird thing is… I didn’t mind putting up with his outrage.” Urahara let out a soft, breathy laugh, a fragmented sigh, all feigned joviality, that died down into a tense, lingering moment of silence that lasted far too long for Zaraki’s comfort. The only sound to be heard was the gentle ticking of the kitchen clock. “It was his sadness that I hated more than anything,” Urahara continued, at last. “There were long stretches of time, always after a fight or a failed experiment, when Kurotsuchi-san would just go quiet for days, even weeks at a time. And I could tell that he’d given up on everything. And it was moments like that, when he’d lock himself in the bathroom and I could hear those shaky, muffled breaths coming from behind the door, that a part of me wanted to just… drag him out and beg him to start screaming at me all over again. It was difficult to put up with him. He had terrible psychological issues, but I knew, somehow, I just had this feeling, that I was Kurotsuchi-san’s last chance at life. If I didn’t keep him with me, and give him something to work on, some distraction to help him move on with his life, that he’d end up right back in prison, hanging in his cell one day. I wanted to save him. I swore I was going to, if it was the last thing I ever did.”

“Talk about a hero complex,” Zaraki mumbled callously, averting eye contact and rubbing awkwardly at the back of his neck. It wasn’t as though he were trying to be purposefully cruel, but he just didn’t know what else to say. He had to add some casualness back into that heavy conversation. Though Urahara had voluntarily offered all that information himself, there was a part of Zaraki that still felt like an intruder, glimpsing into the secret lives of two strange men who had far more depth than he had ever realized. “You didn’t think he’d be better off seeing a real therapist instead of fucking around in a lab with you?”

“We’re talking about Kurotsuchi-san, you know. He would’ve held my face down against a hot plate if I’d so much as recommended therapy,” Urahara laughed, his smile, bright as the sun, beaming from ear to ear. The gentle kindness of that smile made rancid bile bubble up Zaraki’s throat. “Besides, maybe this really is selfish, but I wanted to be to one to save him. I didn’t want to push him off onto anyone else.”

“You’re right,” Zaraki agreed, crossing his arms. “That _is_ selfish.”

“I don’t deny it,” Urahara admitted surprisingly quickly. His hand reached up, gripping at the rim of his hat and tugging it down, just a mere centimeter. It was a remarkably familiar gesture that Zaraki could have sworn he’d seen before. “Maybe I’m too much like Kurotsuchi-san, in that regard. We’re both just scientists, watching over our little pet projects. I wanted to push him. To test his limits and see just how far he could go. I wanted to stand at a distance and watch him get quicker, and smarter, and stronger, until he was flying, and I was the one left behind in the dust. That’s the way I always felt about him, anyway. And I’m sure that’s exactly how Kurotsuchi-san felt about that daughter of his. I think that’s why it hurt him so much to lose her. She must have been his raison d'etre, just as much as he was mine.” 

“Hold up. You lost me. What was that about a raisin?” Zaraki asked, dumbfounded, feeling left behind in the metaphorical dust. 

“Oh, it’s not important,” Urahara dismissed with a quiet laugh, waving his hand as though to brush him aside. “I was just rambling about nothing like I usually do. Anyway, I really do owe you an apology, Zaraki-san. I really didn’t mean to talk your ear off.”

“At least you were saying something interesting this time, instead of spittin’ out bullshit like you always do.”

“You think talking about Kurotsuchi-san is ‘interesting,’ huh?” Urahara repeated, glancing up at him with a knowing glint in his eye, sharp and shrewd. “Is that it?”

“What’s with that stupid smile?”

“It’s nothing,” Urahara dismissed with a shake of his head. “I was just thinking that it’s not like you to take an interest in anything other than fighting, and sweating, and getting stronger. ‘Thug life,’ right? You get so passionate when you talk about things like that. Like when you told that story about how you decimated Madarame-san during your last MMA bout, or whatever you want to call it. Ayasegawa-san was practically shrieking from excitement, too. I can see why the three of you are all so close, but I can’t imagine that Kurotsuchi-san would be interested in any part of that lifestyle. I honestly don’t know what interests you about him.”

In truth, Zaraki didn’t quite know the answer to that question, himself. By all means, he and Kurotsuchi were polar opposites, thesis and antithesis, but the more Zaraki considered the details, the more he began to wonder whether there was something similar between them, after all. At least deep beneath the surface. He saw reflections of himself in Kurotsuchi, in his stubbornness and ambition. Though they worked in completely different realms, combat and academia, the factors that drove them forward were exactly the same. 

“You take a look at the guy recently? What ain’t interesting about that?” Zaraki asked with a rumbling scoff, dismissing Urahara’s question completely and ending the conservation, right then and there.

“Fair enough. But there’s taking an interest in someone, and then there’s being interested _in_ someone, don’t you think? You should decide which path you want to follow before Kurotsuchi-san takes the initiative and decides that for you. That’s the advice I would’ve given to myself all those years ago, anyway. If only I’d stopped waffling and just said something to him. I’ve been kicking myself ever since.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Zaraki asked, though Urahara only brushed off his concerns with another infuriatingly casual wave of his hand.

“It’s nothing. Don’t think too hard about it and hurt your head, now,” Urahara teased, giving him one last, playful smile, starkly contrasted by the glint in his eyes, shrewd and far too cunning. “Hey,” he interjected suddenly, snapping Zaraki out of his thoughts, “why don’t I watch the shop for a bit? You should go out and get some air. Maybe head to Starbucks for a while.”

“Why would I want to go there? Their coffee is shit.”

“I won’t debate you about that,” Urahara laughed, the sound, lilting and bright. “But you might run into our old friend if you head that way. The man still needs his coffee, and he’s not going to come here while I’m around.” 

Though Zaraki nodded and turned towards the door, before he simply rushed out, he couldn’t help but hesitate. He took one, last look at Urahara, still smiling at him from a distance, and wondered whether the man wasn’t sabotaging himself.

“Why don’t I watch the shop and you go? I don’t like talkin’ about feelings and shit, but I, uh… I can tell that Kurotsuchi means a lot to you,” he stammered, as the discomfort began to settle in. “More than he means to me, anyway.”

“Are you sure about that?” Urahara asked. As though to distance himself from both Zaraki and the situation at hand, Urahara took a step back and then another, until he was leaning up against the wall, pressing his back against the brick. “I won’t deny that I care about Kurotsuchi-san, but it’s precisely because I care that I’m not going after him. Nothing has changed about the way that I feel about him. I want him to be happy – but I have the feeling that he’d be happier without me. You should be the one to go. Do me a favor and check up on him for me, would you?”

“Well, if you say it that way. No regrets, right?”

“Right.”

As he reached for the door handle, Zaraki could see Urahara waving goodbye from the reflection on the sunlit glass. There kinder part of Zaraki thought about asking him to reconsider, but all that was selfish in him pushed open that door and left his boss behind. When he passed the window of the store, he saw Urahara’s joyless smile finally slip away.


	6. Chapter 6

Zaraki let out a rumbling laugh, loud enough to shatter eardrums, if not windows.

“You really walked all the way to Starbucks just to get away from Urahara. Unbelievable.”

Kurotsuchi stiffened. Even his chest lay motionless, holding his breath, still as lifeless stone. He pulled the pages his newspaper taut, near to the point of tearing it in two. For what seemed like ages, he didn’t say a single word, almost as though he wasn’t even about to dignify Zaraki’s intrusion with a response. It would be fitting for him, anyway. Finally, like rusted gears, his vertebrae cracked to life, shifting one by one until the rust flaked off like serpent’s scales. Kurotsuchi glanced over his shoulder and stared at him, his eyes, wide and still. Pupils, mere pinpoints. 

“Zaraki. Shouldn’t you be slaving away in a kitchen somewhere?”

“Shouldn’t you be driving to work? It’s six forty-five in the morning, already, and you’re just sittin’ around with your thumbs up your ass,” Zaraki countered, taking a quick glance at the clock. “Ain’t you usually complaining about being late by now? You jackass. You’re always raising hell back at my place around this time, but over here at Starbucks, you’re a good little boy, ain’t you? A real model citizen.”

Zaraki clapped his palm against the back of Kurotsuchi’s chair with an audible bang, sending all nearby customers jolting up against their seats as though struck by the force of lightning. He felt a dozen pairs of eyes travelling over his body, taking in the sight of a veritable walking mountain – muscles, and scars, and matted hair. One by one, the other customers stood and trickled away, dragging their newspapers and sugar bombs with them, leaving Kurotsuchi all by his lonesome. That was the one good thing about being an ex-con, Zaraki realized – he always had a seat at the bar and a place in line ready and waiting for him. 

It didn’t take long for Zaraki to clear up the table and throw himself down onto the sofa across from his acquaintance – never a friend yet not quite an enemy, anyway. Displeasure twisted across Kurotsuchi’s face like ivy. 

“What did you say?”

“Come on. Weren’t you listening? I know that car crash left you with some hearing problems, but you got those fancy implants. They just for show, or what?”

“Perhaps, while I hear you well enough, by this point, I’ve learned that you never have anything of value to say. Perhaps I’ve learned to filter out your pointless drivel for the sake of my own sanity,” Kurotsuchi practically growled back, golden teeth bared. He stood suddenly, grabbing his drink. “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

“Hey, come on, don’t go,” Zaraki pleaded, reaching for Kurotsuchi’s knee and giving him a gentle push, stopping him before he could storm out the door. “Look, I’m sorry if I hit a sore spot. Okay? I won’t bring it up again. Now, can you sit back down? I just want to talk to you for a bit.” 

“Regarding what?” Kurotsuchi scoffed, though, as request, he slid back down into his chair, all the same. “I’ll have you know that I’m rather busy, at the moment. Like you said, I’m late for work. Unfortunately, this café, unlike yours, actually has a line. It took me twenty minutes to get this drink, and I’m running short on time.”

“Quit your bitching. This’ll only take a minute,” Zaraki insisted. He was a man who spoke his mind. A man with no filter, who said it like it was – but when it came to Kurotsuchi, he found that he simply couldn’t hold his thoughts together. They fell apart like sand, running through his fingers. “Look,” he said at last through a breathy sigh, “I’ve always hated talking about sensitive shit, but I –” Taking in a sharp breath through chipped teeth, Zaraki ran a calloused palm down his windburned face, as though wiping his own slate clean. “This is really fucking embarrassing, but I was worried about you. Okay? All that heavy shit that you told me yesterday, about your daughter, made me think that maybe you ain’t as put together as you make it look like you are. When you didn’t show up at the café this morning, it made me wonder whether you weren’t off doing something stupid. Urahara said you were fine, but I wanted to make sure for myself. It ain’t like I can trust anything that comes out of that flaky bastard’s mouth, anyway. So… I guess that’s it. I’m just here to check in on you. How you holdin’ up, Kurotsuchi? Tell me honestly. You doin’ okay?”

Kurotsuchi looked straight at him, then, no more leering, no more intimidation tactics – and yet he didn’t say a single word. His expression was open, honest, as human as Zaraki had ever seen, and yet it strangely as alien as always. Cradling his drink in his hands, Kurotsuchi’s painted thumbnail toyed against the edge of the plastic cover. 

“Oh.”

Zaraki stared back at him, stunned to pure silence. He pressed his lips into a tight, thin line, and it was only then that he realized how dry they were. Uncomfortably, he ran his lower lip against his teeth, pulling at the loose, flaking skin. 

“Yeah? What do you mean ’oh?’” Zaraki parroted back, confused. 

Kurotsuchi shook his head. 

“I… fear that I’m not quite certain what you’d like for me to say. I wasn’t expecting to see a genuine display of concern out of you,” he mumbled, his voice, trailing off, growing weaker and warier, heavy with uncertainty. “I don’t receive those very often.” 

“It’s easy. Just tell me the truth,” Zaraki sighed, leaning back against the couch cushions. “If you’re okay, well, good. But if you ain’t, I’ll figure something out, and we can work through it together. Maybe we can, hell, I don’t know. Start hanging out or something. We can go see a movie or… get ice cream, or whatever.” 

Wouldn’t Yachiru be proud. 

“That won’t be necessary,” Kurotsuchi stammered, gripping onto his stupid crescent hat, pulling it lower, as though to physically shield himself from embarrassment. The way he drew back, sinking into his chair, made it appear as though he were physically wounded, caught off guard for the first time in ages and shot with a bullet, point blank to the gut. 

“What’s wrong? Not a fan of ice cream? Or is it me you don’t like?” Zaraki teased, unable to hide his downcast sigh at the realization that he may not be far from the truth with that latter assumption.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with you,” Kurotsuchi admitted, shrinking into himself and cradling his little cup of coffee. It was a strange, sheepish gesture that could have, coming from any other man, been interpreted as timidity. “I simply don’t socialize with others very often. I don’t usually care to do so. As you can see, I don’t tend to have a lot in common with other people.”

“I get you,” Zaraki said with a stiff, terse nod. “Or at least I think I do. It’s like there’s some kind of separating you apart from other people. Right? Like you’re a different species, or speak a different language, or live in different worlds, or like you’re just different in general.” 

“Hm. That’s a rather clever guess,” Kurotsuchi answered without truly admitting or denying anything.

“Is it?” Zaraki chuckled, basking in the glory of Kurotsuchi’s compliment, anyway. “I’m just telling you how it is for me, sometimes. Like I’m an outcast. You get me? It’s like I always was, even when I was just some kid, living in the bad part of the city. You’d hear politicians talk about caring about the poor, about wanting to help us, but I saw one of them one day in the mall, with a beautiful woman hanging off his arm, and when I went up to him to say hi, he couldn’t have kicked me away any faster. I still remember the way he was lookin’ at me. Like I was scum. World’s filled with people just like that: the two-faced kind that only care about appearances. They smile at you when you’re looking and stab you in the back when you ain’t. I guess that’s what I like about you,” he added, with a subtle smile, just a subtle twitch at the corner of his mouth. “What you see is what you get. You never pretend to be anything you ain’t. You’re just… you. I can respect that. Even if you say you don’t relate to other people, I think you got that much in common with me.”

From Kurotsuchi’s body language, his shoulders, stiff, and his spine, hunched forward, positively huddling into himself, it was clear that the man wasn’t accustomed to receiving praise, either. Silver tongue turned to lead, he said nothing at all, and an awkward silence descended upon their isolated corner of the café. Despite the heavy atmosphere, however, a gentle calm began to settle in Zaraki’s heart. Leaning back against the sofa cushions, he realized that, sitting across from Kurotuschi, sipping at coffee and listening to the idle voices of the people around them, he’d somehow achieved a sense of normalcy, of happiness and domesticity, that had always eluded him. He wondered if that was how ordinary men always felt: safe and warm.

“How’s the coffee, by the way?” Zaraki asked, just to break the silence.

“It’s not as good as yours,” Kurotsuchi replied, visibly relieved to be changing the subject. “When I saw that they brewed their coffee in a machine, I requested that they take the time to create a custom blend and do a traditional pour-over for me, but that didn’t seem to make a difference, with regards to the outcome. The flavor profile is bland, all the same. It’s really quite disappointing.”

“You ordered a pour-over during morning rush hour?” Zaraki laughed, leaning forward, entranced by a man with whom he had, perhaps, only one thing in common. “Damn. It’s your first time at Starbucks, and you already managed to make yourself everyone’s least favorite customer. I’m actually impressed how fast you make enemies. You got a real talent for being an asshole.” 

“You make it sound as though I’m purposefully abrasive,” he scoffed.

“Ain’t you?”

“Of course not,” he denied, shooting Zaraki a hardened glare, cold and withering. Though Zaraki was certain he’d done nothing wrong, it managed to make him feel like the scum of the earth, all the same. “As you stated earlier, I only ever say what’s on my mind. It’s other people who choose to take offense to that.” 

“You really are a mean son of a bitch,” Zaraki replied, deadpan, though his gaze slowly softened, melting into something almost akin to fondness. “But I guess I ain’t complaining. You always say whatever the hell you want, and it’s never anything good, but I think, in its own way, that attitude’s actually kind of refreshing. People talk shit all the time. At least you got the balls to say it to my face. Guess that’s another thing I like about you.”

Kurotsuchi grinned back at him. His laughter, bright and bold, rang through the air with a shameless audacity, a unique, sharp edge of teasing cruelty that was always so indicative of Kurotsuchi – everything he was and all he represented. It was brash, and toxic, and mocking, and Zaraki had never heard a sound more beautiful than that. A tingling excitement rose up within the pit of his chest. It took him a moment to realize it was joy. 

Pure, unbridled joy. 

“Interesting,” Kurotsuchi mused, stroking his nail against his scarred jawline. “I was just about to say the same of you. For better or worse – and it’s usually worse, unfortunately – you always speak your mind. As irritating as that can be, there exists a certain charm in that brutish lack of subtlety. You’ve always come across as rather genuine. At least in my opinion.” He leaned forward, then, glancing over him with a curious tilt of his head. Studying him. “That’s a rare trait, you know. You should take pride in that,” Kurotsuchi added, his voice, low and quiet, a display of rare sincerity. “It’s difficult for people to live honestly in world like this, but I wouldn’t ever want to compromise my own goals to better fit some arbitrary cookie cutter mold of society’s ideal man. You shouldn’t either.”

“I don’t intend to. Still, that’s one hell of a backhanded compliment. You’re makin’ us sound like a couple of freaks that no one else wants around.”

“I’m not denying that,” Kurotsuchi teased with a quiet chuckle, “but it’s up to you, whether you interpret that as insult, or otherwise. I certainly wouldn’t, in your position, but then again, I’ve always had a special fondness for the unorthodox.”

Their eyes met. Zaraki’s shocked, wide-open green met Kurotsuchi’s sinister, half-lidded gold, and Zaraki wondered, then, whether Kurotsuchi wasn’t, in fact, talking about being fond of _him_ , in his own subtle, roundabout way. A fondness for the unorthodox. Zaraki wondered whether he wasn’t suffering from something akin to that, too.  
He coughed into his fist.

“I know you said you ain’t interested in hanging out or doing anything special,” Zaraki blurted out, suddenly, against his better judgement, “but if you want, maybe you can stop by the café a little earlier, sometime, and we can just talk. It’s fine if you stop by before we open. I can unlock the doors for you. Yumichika and Ikkaku usually come in right around six, so if you get there earlier than that, it’ll… you know. It’ll be just the two of us for a while,” he said, his voice, trailing off into embarrassment and uncertainty. Though he was known for his boldness, Zaraki didn’t know what the hell he was saying. When he looked back up, however, he knew his fears were baseless. Kurotsuchi didn’t look entirely disgusted by the idea he’d proposed. Not nearly as disgusted as Zaraki had anticipated, anyway. 

Kurotsuchi eyes shifted upwards, meeting his, and the minutes passed them by in silence. If it were any other man sitting across from him, Zaraki would have interjected, saying something for himself and rushing along to a conclusion, but he knew that Kurotsuchi wouldn’t have appreciated the gesture. Though he didn’t say anything at all, his mind must have twisted as a maelstrom of thoughts. 

“Why are you doing this?” 

“Doing what?” Zaraki asked.

“Why are you going out of your way to spend time with me?” 

For once in his life, that man who knew everything, the gods’ gift to science, sounded genuinely perplexed. His darkened expression contorted in focused consternation, trying to solve a mystery, even the basics of which he simply couldn’t grasp. In response, Zaraki could only laugh.

“You make it sound like talkin’ to you is some kind of chore no one wants to do.” He didn’t get a reply to that. Kurotsuchi only looked away, his thumbnail, still roughly bending the plastic lid of his coffee cup. “You know, for someone so smart, you really are a dumbass,” Zaraki taunted, his tone, light and teasing. “We’re friends, ain’t we? The way I see it, loners like us don’t make too many of those, so we got to look out for the ones we got.”

Kurotsuchi stared at him like a deer in the headlights, wide-eyed and stiff, fearful yet paralyzed, unable to look away from the brightness and the ruin. But within a split second, it was over. His expression relaxed, silent and taciturn, before his eyebrows furrowed, and his jaw tightened, and he took on that horrid look of barely constrained, hair-trigger irritation, just as he always did. 

“What are you talking about? I don’t have any friends,” Kurotsuchi grumbled. Though he was surely attempting to sound intimidating, Zaraki couldn’t help but feel as though he sounded more like a petulant child, arguing just for the sake of being contrary. 

“Alright,” he relented, lifting his open palms in mock surrender. “Maybe it don’t got nothin’ to do with friendship, and we’re actually just a couple of mean, dried up, old ex-cons, griping about our prison days.”

“Why are you mentioning that in public?” Kurotsuchi growled, gathering up his coffee and his briefcase and pushing himself to his feet. “That’s it. I’ve had enough of you. I can only tolerate so much nonsense in the morning.”

“Get out of here, then, if you’re gonna complain about it. It ain’t like I’m gonna stop you.” Zaraki hadn’t even finished speaking, and Kurotsuchi had already started storming off towards the door. Before the man could get too far, however, Zaraki called out to him, one last time. “By the way, I get to the shop around five-thirty, if you want to come early.”

Kurotsuchi never agreed to the arrangement; he didn’t even give off any indication that he’d heard Zaraki at all – except for the fact that he’d paused, mid-step, and seemed to program something into his phone. 

“You’d be lucky if I showed up at all,” he said, before continuing his warpath out the door. Kurotsuchi never even turned back to look at him as he left. 

“Yeah,” Zaraki sighed, casting one last, lingering glance at him from the other side of the café window. “Luckiest man in whole damn world.”


	7. Chapter 7

“How’s the coffee?” Zaraki asked, smiling, as he took a seat across from the man who had become his most beloved and his least favorite customer, all at once. 

It seemed, at times, that Kurotsuchi, himself, was a paradox. As nauseatingly vile as the man often was, Zaraki had to admit that there was still quite a bit to admire about him. Kurotsuchi’s life was an underdog’s tale: the story of an ordinary boy with neither prestige nor power, who grew into a remarkably capable man who could overcome even the most trying of ordeals that the gods set before him. He was one of a kind. A man who fell down and never gave up. A man who made his mark on the world, rising above nepotism, breaking glass ceilings, and all while armed with nothing more than the natural gift of merit and his own, insatiable ambition. Kurotsuchi was a cruel, mean-spirited eccentric, but Zaraki could see why he succeeded in spite of his utter lack of charm. He was the very model of a classical scholar: bold and creative, worldly and eloquent. 

Everything that Zaraki wasn’t. He simply didn’t know why that interested him as much as it did. 

Normally, at five thirty in the morning, Zaraki would be a dead man walking, prepping for a long day’s work while shaking off the last, lingering throbs of his latest hangover, but on that day, he couldn’t have been more alert. The moment he’d heard Kurotsuchi knocking at his door, adrenaline rushed through his veins, just as the same as though he were walking into the ring for a championship match. Sweat on his brow and the flood of blinding overhead lights, sending sparks dancing in the corner of his vision. He couldn’t have been more awake if Kurotsuchi had injected undiluted caffeine straight into his bloodstream.

“You like it?” Zaraki asked.

“I haven’t decided upon that quite yet. This is different from what you usually prepare.”

“You catch on quick.” Honestly, he was kind of impressed. Most people, nowadays, barely knew the difference between coffee beans and soybeans. “I’m glad you noticed. The coffee I serve up is always good quality, but that,” he continued, pointing at Kurotsuchi’s cup, “came out of my private stash. It’s Panama Esmeralda Geisha: the best damn beans in the world.” 

“It’s certainly distinct.”

“Ain’t it?” Zaraki agreed with a charming smile, visibly perking up. “I ain’t too poetic when it comes to describing flavors and shit, but there’s something special about this coffee. You get me? It has a really nice scent. Almost fruity. What do you think?”

“I’d agree with that. It’s strongly aromatic, heavily reminiscent of… jasmine and citrus, I would say, though I’m not certain whether I would describe it as being closer to lemon or bergamot. Regardless, the citrus notes grant the roast a fresh acidity. Though I wouldn’t call it sour. The finishing notes are smooth and sweet, more than anything else. It’s a rather complex flavor profile.”

“Damn, that was pretty good!” Zaraki blurted out with a burst of sincere laughter, energetic and loud as fireworks that sent Kurotsuchi pulling back in his seat from the unexpected shock of sound. With a muffled cough into his fist, Zaraki quieted himself, though his smile never so much as wavered. “You sounded like a real food critic just then,” he said. “But you’re always good with words. Half the shit you say sounds like it’s comin’ straight out of a textbook somewhere.” 

The other half of Kurotsuchi’s speech sounded like a yakuza, but Zaraki didn’t feel the need to mention that unsavory detail. 

“It isn’t that I’m particularly eloquent,” Kurotsuchi replied, spitting on his compliment. “I’m only eloquent in comparison to you. You should read more, Zaraki. Expand your vocabulary. Perhaps then, other people will actually take you seriously.” 

Kurotsuchi shrugged and took a sip of his coffee with his golden eyes, falling closed. So goddamn arrogant. It made Zaraki’s heart flutter, a strange sickness close to nausea bubbling up, warm, in the pit of his stomach. 

“I have an extensive library if you’d like to borrow a book, sometime,” Kurotsuchi continued. “It’s mostly world history and classic literature.”

“Hell no,” Zaraki sputtered; he couldn’t reject that offer any faster. “Classic literature? That’s fucking boring, Kurotsuchi. I ain’t got time for that.” 

“You don’t have time to read?” he asked, with his perfectly plucked eyebrows furrowed, “What did you do while you were in prison? We had nothing but time.”

“What do you think I did?” Zaraki scoffed, “I worked out. That’s how I got so tough. You know, Kurotsuchi, maybe if you quit reading so much and started lifting weights, you’d put some meat on those twiggy little bones of yours. Hell, maybe you’d even stop getting blown around the streets every time the wind picked up.”

“Maybe if you had put down your weights, now and then, and picked up a book, once in a while, you wouldn’t be working in a coffee shop at your age.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. I’m damn proud of what I do,” Zaraki snapped back, crumpling up a napkin and tossing it Kurotsuchi’s way. That man’s reflexes were so slow, he didn’t even come close to dodging it. “I make good coffee and send the profits back to help out prisoners who’re stuck in the same crappy place we were in. There ain’t any better job than that.”

“Stop mentioning that. I hate it when you speak as though the two of us are similar in the slightest,” Kurotsuchi practically snarled, slamming both that crumpled napkin and his palm down onto the table. “You are nothing more than a violent, empty-minded savage. There is nothing going on inside that skull of yours. No higher thought, no dreams for the future. Nothing but radio static! Perhaps we both have criminal records, but I am nothing like you.”

“Violent?” Zaraki growled, leaning forward, casting his shadow over his much smaller companion. “Oh, that’s fucking hilarious coming from you. Urahara told me all about how you’d completely lose it and start smashing up his lab back when you worked for him.”

Struck by surprise, or perhaps it was pure, unadulterated shock, Kurotsuchi paused mid-sip, glancing up at Zaraki above the rim of his mug. His gold eyes, brighter than the moon, above a smear of dark, black eyeliner. Speechless, without once breaking that unshakable eye contact, Kurotsuchi lowered his cup back onto its saucer. His movements were deliberate, agonizingly slow, as he carefully leaned back and folded his hands in his lap. 

In all that time, Kurotsuchi never even blinked.

“How did you find out about that?” he asked, suddenly, in cold monotone, breaking what felt like years of steely silence. “I thought you’d said that you had no intentions of prying into my personal life.”

“I wasn’t trying to,” Zaraki quickly defended. He knew that the topic of Kurotsuchi’s temporary subservience to Urahara, itself, was somewhat sensitive, but he’d never believed that Kurotsuchi would be so upset about it. Even the topic of his imprisonment and his own daughter’s death didn’t shake him half as much. “Urahara brought it up on his own – and you know him. Once he starts talking, he never shuts up. I don’t even remember how all of that came up in the first place.”

“I see. Then he’s been talking about me behind my back. I’ll need to have a serious conversation with him, in that case.” Kurotsuchi started fiddling with his phone, his expression, tense and dark. “I should go.” 

“Wait!” Zaraki shouted, jolting up from his chair with so much force that it audibly skittered back against the wooden floor. Kurotsuchi flinched at the sound, sinking down into his chair as Zaraki, practically gasping for breath, towered above him. The sigh he released seemed to take with it all of his pent-up tension, all of his fear. “Just wait a minute,” Zaraki repeated, far more calmly. “I really don’t want you to go. Okay? I’m sorry I even brought that up. I didn’t know Urahara was that big of a sore spot. If I did, I never would have even mentioned him.”

“I want you to forget everything that you heard from that man. Is that understood?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I hear you,” Zaraki sighed, falling back down into his chair. He understood. They both had skeletons in their closets. “But if you ask me, Kurotsuchi,” he said, wanting to be honest, “just because you needed Urahara’s help when you in trouble doesn’t make you weak, or stupid, or whatever the hell you think –”

“I thought that I ordered you to forget about it,” Kurotsuchi snapped, spitting venom, every bit as ferocious as the viper that Zaraki had always thought he was. “I don’t care what you think. I don’t need you to comfort me, and I don’t want to talk about it.” 

“Okay, okay…” Zaraki relented, squeezing at his nose bridge, scratching his blunted nails against his windburned skin. “I’ll forget he ever mentioned it. You never needed anyone’s help, much less Urahara’s. You were always a genius and a badass. A real lone wolf,” he recited with sarcasm, dripping from every syllable. 

“That’s right. I was always a force to be reckoned with. Always unstoppable,” Kurotsuchi echoed, though, for some strange reason that Zaraki couldn’t understand, he seemed to lack his usual confidence. The way Kurotsuchi turned his face, staring out the window towards the rain and the grey, bustling cityscape, made Zaraki wonder why he was so insistent on perpetuating that lie. 

And he knew, beneath all of the posturing and Kurotsuchi’s own, special brand of machismo, that it _was_ a lie. After all, even strong, wise men were still, only men. They weren’t immune to pain. They could still feel shame. Fear. Sorrow. 

Even men like them were prone to it, at times. 

“Men really get the short of the stick in our society sometimes, huh?” Zaraki asked, gently, if only to fucking say something. “We always got to be the best at everything. We can’t have any weaknesses, and we can’t ask for help, but pretending we’re unstoppable all the time – it’s exhausting, ain’t it? At least it is for me,” Zaraki shrugged, daring himself to have the audacity to be honest. “The guys here all know I had it rough in the past, but what they don’t realize is how badly those low points in my life really got to me. I try to act like none of it ever meant anything, that I was always fine with who I am and where I was in life, but that’s a lie. Living on the streets, struggling just to get food in my stomach, messed me up good. There’s been a lot of people in my life who looked down on me, who’d call me a thug, or a low-life, or a dumbass – but the thing is they weren’t tellin’ me anything I didn’t already believe about myself. That’s what really fucked me up. I was my own worst critic. Living on the streets, having nothing to live _for_ , thinking there was nothing good about me, and that no one would even notice if I just dropped dead one day – it was the worst feeling in the world. It made me feel like I wasn’t any better than some stupid street dog, fighting over scraps and barking over nothing. It was actually my old MMA coach, the one who first got me into the sport, who started changing all of that for me. I thought she was just some helpless, little lady at first, but when I tried to mug her, she put up one hell of a fight. That day when I fought her was the first time I ever felt alive. Fighting always came easy to me; there was never much of a challenge. But fighting Unohana was the first time I ever had to push myself to win. And I _did_ want to win – not just to survive, but to prove to myself that I could do it. That was the first time I ever wanted something like that for myself. Something other than food or shelter. You know? I fought like I wanted her to look at me. She made me want to be somebody. I’ll always owe her for that.”

Knowing Kurotsuchi’s personality, Zaraki had half expected the man to burst into laughter or to scold him for wasting his time with the most boring story he’d ever heard, but, to his credit, he stayed, and it even seemed as though he was listening. Even so, Zaraki couldn’t begin to guess what he was thinking. Kurotsuchi’s face was unreadable, still and expressionless. Almost as though the man, himself, were made of stone.

“Why are you telling me something like this?” Kurotsuchi asked. His tone was flat, giving Zaraki no indication of how he’d wanted him to respond. 

“Honestly? I don’t know,” he admitted, half laughing. “Maybe I just… didn’t want you to think you were alone in feeling like a loser when you were younger. Or maybe it’s because I got some real embarrassing dirt on you from talking to Urahara, so it’s only fair that you hear something about me, too. Now, we can finally call it even.” 

“What an overly simplistic answer,” Kurotsuchi scoffed, and though he scowled all always, strangely, he didn’t sound entirely disappointed. “You really are a fool.”

Zaraki couldn’t help but smile.

“You didn’t let me finish,” he laughed, gently kicking at Kurotsuchi’s ankle under the table. “Maybe I also told you that story because I wanted you to know that even badasses need help sometimes. There were a couple times in my life when I really did, anyway. I know how it is to be proud, and to be embarrassed about being seen as weak, or stupid, or useless. But I know how it feels, so you really don’t got to hide it from me. I won’t ever look down on you if you need me to post your bail or something, one of these days, or, hell, if you need me for anything else, even if it’s something stupid like opening pickle jars or dropping off food when you’re sick. You can come to me if you need a hand, Kurotsuchi. I mean that.” 

The way Kurotsuchi paused, then shook his head, looking back at him with that furrowed brow and that withering glare, Zaraki couldn’t tell whether he was more exasperated or embarrassed. 

“Do you make that kind of heartfelt offer to all of your friends?” Kurotsuchi asked with a pensive sigh, as he rubbed, firmly, at his temple.

“No, just you so far. But what’s it even matter?” he asked, puzzled.

Kurotsuchi paused for a moment, leaning forward to hold his gaze as though observing him, studying him, like a specimen in his petri dish. 

“You really shouldn’t say things like that so casually, Zaraki.” Kurotsuchi said at last, mildly scolding. Zaraki didn’t know why he had to take that serious tone. “I may misconstrue your intentions one of these days. Do you understand?”

“No. Not really,” he said, reaching down to take a sip of his own coffee. The flavor was bright and floral, with a smooth finish, just as Kurotsuchi had described it. Zaraki had always thought the same; he’d just never managed to put his thoughts to words. 

Kurotsuchi shook his head, tutting at him like an old, British grandmother. 

“You really are a fool.”

“I heard you the first time,” Zaraki grumbled, resisting the urge to kick him harder. “You don’t got to say it twice.” 

“I’ll say it as often as I must, until the truth of the matter finally sinks in.”

“Really. Guess you’ll have to keep coming here early just to make sure I remember it, right?” Zaraki joked. 

“I’ll come for the coffee, if nothing else. You do not possess many merits, Zaraki, but I must admit that, despite all appearances, you are quite the barista.” 

“Here I thought that you, of all people, would’ve learned how stupid it is to make assumptions about a guy just from the way he looks.”

“I’m not without my personal biases. I’m only a man, after all. But perhaps you’re right; I should know better, by now, considering my own experiences.” Sipping idly at his coffee, Kurotsuchi seemed to be in his own little world, never having noticed Zaraki’s hopeful stare. Not until the minutes passed and he finally glanced up. “Why are you looking at me like that?” 

“I don’t know. Just thought there might be something you want to say to me.” 

“You’re not getting an apology out of me, if that’s what you were anticipating,” Kurotsuchi scoffed, sticking his nose up in the air and literally looking down on him. “Regardless, I’ve already complimented your coffee. You should be grateful for my generosity.”

“Right, right…” Zaraki chuckled, shaking his head. “I don’t got any merits, and I look like a dumbass, but, hey, at least I make a good cup of coffee.”

“That’s more than I can say about others,” Kurotsuchi shrugged, absolutely shameless. “The vast majority of people in this world have no unique talents whatsoever. You should treasure yours. Your coffee preparation is far superior to that of your colleagues. I appreciate how you take your time with the brewing process every morning, instead of trying to rush it along, just to get me out of here. I’ve never mentioned this before, but I can always taste the care that you put into it. I’ve always valued that.”

That was, perhaps, the most genuine complement that Zaraki had ever received about his coffee. The fact that said complement had come from a man as bitter and taciturn as Kurotsuchi had only amplified its significance. Zaraki’s smile widened even further.

“Thanks. That means a lot, you know? I try not to get too serious about anything in my life, but I really do care about this job. I want to make good coffee here. Hey, and if you think the coffee’s good, by the way, you should really try the cake. I bake those all myself. I ain’t tryin’ to brag or anything, but my cakes are the best in the city.”

“I’ll have to decline that offer,” Kurotsuchi replied with a teasing smile, lopsided and insincere. Zaraki couldn’t help but get the feeling that he was secretly laughing at him. “I was never particularly fond of sweets. You could prepare the best cakes in the world, and I still wouldn’t enjoy it. Honestly, however, I didn’t know that you were interested in things like that.”

“I ain’t. I never liked baking,” Zaraki readily admitted, shrinking, somewhat, under Kurotsuchi’s scrutinizing glare. “Yachiru’s the one who really likes that stuff. You hear about ex-cons workin’ in kitchens all the time, but I never thought I’d wind up in a place like this. I figured that if I became a cook, I’d be grillin’ up steaks or something, but Yachiru wanted me to work here, so she’d get free food. She got so excited, talking about how we could come up with cake recipes together, and how I could make her all those little dessert drinks. I wasn’t too excited about it or anything, but I figured if I had to give up crime and make an honest living, somehow, I could at least try and do something to make her happy, while I’m at it. I ain’t like you, you know? I ain’t got any fancy degrees or big career dreams. Never gave a damn about any of that – but I do care about Yachiru.”

“What’s your relationship to that girl, anyway?” Kurotsuchi asked him, though his tone, surprisingly, was not entirely unkind. “Are you her father?”

“Might as well be. We ain’t related by blood or anything, but me and Yachiru are family. She’s the only reason why I ain’t lyin’ face-down in a gutter, somewhere, with a bullet in my back. We were both stuck in bad places when we first started talking. I was stuck in prison, getting into fights every damn day and making my sentence even longer, and Yachiru was… well, she was in big trouble,” Zaraki summarized, unwilling to provide any sensitive details. “Her parents didn’t give a shit about her. She was trapped. You’d never think an ex-con and some schoolkid could ever be friends, but me and Yachiru saved each other. I protected her. I gave her courage to stand up for herself and get help, and she’s the one that got me to quit fighting on the streets and start living an honest life.”

“So, now, instead of climbing the ranks of your gang, or what have you, you’re… baking cakes and brewing coffee?” Kurotsuchi asked in disbelieving monotone.

“It don’t sound too impressive when you say it like that,” Zaraki chuckled, weak and awkward, “but that just about sums it up. Honestly, it was tough giving up my old life. It weren’t glorious or nothing, but it ain’t like I hated it. After I met Unohana, though, my old mentor, I got serious about legit fighting: MMA, and boxing, and bodybuilding. I don’t see real blood-pumping street action like I did back when I ran with my old gang, anymore. Now, it’s all clean. Nobody really gets hurt; nobody goes to the hospital. It’s kind of sad, in its own way. I never get to let loose anymore, but it ain’t like I’d ever go back. Getting this job, living honestly, was all for Yachiru. I just got to keep that in mind.” 

“It’s actually rather surprising that you managed to accomplish that,” Kurotsuchi admitted, though he didn’t seem particularly happy about that fact. “Not every man is willing to sacrifice his own ambitions and desires for the sake of his family.”

“Most guys don’t ever have to make that kind of choice, but I’m sure you’d do the same thing for your kid, if you had to.”

“I’m… not so certain of that,” he said, before shifting his attention to his mug, cradled gently in his hands. With a strange, focused intensity, Kurotsuchi studied his own reflection as he would a stranger’s, tilting his head, lost in thought. “It’s strange that you should mention that, by the way,” he added, suddenly, in a voice so quiet that Zaraki almost missed it. “The topic of sacrifice. It’s become a major point of contention in my life. At least, it has in Nemuri’s custody hearings.” 

“What’s causing trouble? Your work hours? Your career?”

“My career, and the fact that I don’t –” his voice trailed off into a resigned, quiet sigh, bleeding the energy right out of him.

“Don’t… what?” Zaraki prompted, though Kurotsuchi only shook his head, brushing him off.

“It’s not important,” Kurotsuchi insisted, before finishing the rest of his coffee. Considering the speed and the fury with which he gathered up his belongings, it was almost though he couldn’t wait to be out of that room. Almost as though he were running away. “Anyways, I should go. It’s almost time for your employees to arrive. It wouldn’t do for them to catch us sitting, together, like this. They really will misconstrue your intentions, if that occurs.”

Just like last time, Zaraki didn’t know what he was talking about, and why the hell he couldn’t stay. He also knew, however, that it was better to avoid putting pressure on him. He was beginning to suspect that Kurotsuchi was one of those ‘introverts’ from Yumichika’s personality quizzes. 

“Alright. If that’s what you want. You comin’ early again tomorrow?” Zaraki asked, as he started stacking up the plates. 

“I’ll consider it. It all depends on what you have to offer. I’m not interested at all in your cake, but I wouldn’t turn down a traditional breakfast, if you could manage to prepare it. I like my miso soup just how I like my coffee: extra hot.”

“Right,” Zaraki scoffed, committing the sight of Kurotsuchi’s bold, shameless little smirk into his memory. “Extra hot, so it’ll really burn when I shove it up your ass.”


	8. Chapter 8

Six in the morning, right on the dot, the welcome bells chimed, and the front door squeaked open. Maybe it was poor customer service, but Zaraki couldn’t even be bothered to glance up from his newspaper as he sat atop a stack of crates in the kitchen. After all, he presumed that it was only Kurotsuchi, coming back to search for a misplaced phone or gaudy leather briefcase. In such an event, his old, beloved enemy wouldn’t be in the mood for a chat. 

It wasn’t until Zaraki heard Yumichika’s cheerful greeting from the register that he considered that his new guest may be someone else entirely. Nobody would have ever sounded so plucky addressing a man like Kurotsuchi, anyway. Ignoring the pop of his stiff knees, Zaraki pushed himself to his feet and made his way out of the kitchen to greet the second, and most likely last, customer of the day. 

When he pushed the door open, however, upon taking in the sight of this mystery customer, Zaraki froze in place, eyes locked on her school uniform: a neatly ironed, plain white blouse and plaid, pleated skirt, just the same as Yachiru’s. He’d expect any pre-teen girl to be just as bubbly, but the little lady in front of him seemed more solemn than anything else, carrying herself with a certain, familiar brand of quiet dignity. 

Yumichika leaned over the counter, smiling at her.

“Do you have any questions about the menu?” he asked. 

The girl only shook her head. 

“To be entirely honest,” she began, in a tone that sent a familiar shiver down his spine. It was even and calm – expressionless. “I didn’t come here to order anything. I only wanted to see this place for myself.” 

“Oh? Is the good word finally spreading about our little café?” Yumichika positively crooned, literally bouncing on his heels like an excited little rabbit. “Did you hear about us from our flyers? I designed those myself, you know. Sprinkled on the glitter and everything.”

“Your flyers certainly were eye-catching.” My, how very diplomatic. Zaraki couldn’t help but raise a brow at that. “I saw them all over the school, but I was never really interested in this place until my father mentioned it. This his favorite café in the city.” 

“Is it, now?” Yumichika asked with a grin, eyes sparkling with excitement and wonder, as he leaned even further over the counter, practically staring that little girl down. “I mean, but _of course_ it is.” He quickly recovered his composure, hiding his smile behind his palm. “This coffee is to die for.” 

She shook her head. 

“Daddy doesn’t come here for the coffee.”

“Is he more of a cake person, then? I don’t blame him for indulging. Our cakes the best in the city,” he said with a smile, as warm and charming as ever, “and the best to look at, too! Our manager does all of the baking, but I’m the one who does the decorating, which is really what matters.”

She chuckled, then, a quiet hum, muffled by the cage of her sealed, subtle smile, “You’re funny, aren’t you. Hey… your name wouldn’t happen to be Zaraki-san, would it?” she asked, him, suddenly – and, oh, if that didn’t shut him up.

“Zaraki? No, that’s… my manager’s name. Don’t tell me that you have a complaint already.”

“It’s nothing like that,” she reassured him with a cute shake of her head, tousling her bangs. “It’s just that my father specifically mentioned that name. It’s Zaraki this, and Zaraki that. I was only thinking that if Zaraki were a man as funny and kind as you, then maybe…” Though her voice remained quiet and even, a barely perceptible aggression was bubbling up in her tone. It was silently sinister, venomous and lethal, and Zaraki realized that he’d heard it before. It was type of poorly constrained, simmering fury that had sent beakers and paperwork flying. It was the type of anger and hatred that sent Ikkaku and Yumichika scampering off into the kitchen. It was an anger more befitting a pharaoh-like man with elaborate headdresses and golden teeth. “Maybe I can’t blame him for spending so much time in a place like this.”

Realizing who that girl really was, Zaraki placed a hand on Yumichika’s shoulder and took over the register. 

“Hey. You Kurotsuchi’s kid?” Zaraki asked. From the corner of his eye, he watched as Yumichika took one last, curious glance in their direction before retreating back to the kitchen, as instructed. Returning his attention to the girl, Zaraki realized that she looked nothing like her father. She was a normal Japanese kid, fair-skinned, black-haired, and perfectly plain, whereas her father was truly one of a kind. Dark skin and piercing eyes, brighter than the sun. 

“Yes,” she stammered, resisting the urge to step back, away from the mountain of a man towering over her. Zaraki could see her foot slowly inching towards the door, before she forced herself to freeze in place. “That’s right. How did you know?”

“Lucky guess. You talk fancy for a kid; I figured Kurotsuchi would be one of those tiger dads that expects perfect marks, even in reading and writing.”

“That’s Daddy for you,” she confirmed with an awkward smile and a despondent sigh that left her true emotions a mystery. “You seem to know him pretty well, Zaraki-san. Did he mention me, at all?”

“Sure he did. You’re Nemuri, right?”

“Yes, that’s right! So he _did_ talk about me. What did he say?” she asked, going from zero to ten within a matter of seconds, practically bursting with excitement. “Did Daddy mention my ballet recital? He couldn’t come because of work, but Akon-kun recorded it for him. And I’m going to dance again at my school’s talent show. Did he talk about that, at all?”

“No, he didn’t really say all that much about your dancing,” Zaraki said, trying his best to paint Kurotsuchi in as flattering a light as possible. Even though the rat bastard pissed him off more often than not, he wasn’t about to slander him in front of his own kid. “We talked more about his work. You know. Science sh –” He coughed into his fist. “Things. Science things.” 

“Oh. Science,” she parroted back with her lips, shiny with pink glitter gloss, pressed into a tight, thin line. When she next spoke, she mumbled, almost as though she didn’t truly want him to hear – “His favorite thing in the world.”

“Well, we talked about more than that. He talked a lot about your sister and uh… other things that kids don’t need to know about. I heard about what happened to your big sister, by the way. I’m sorry to hear about that.”

As if it couldn’t get any worse, at the very first mention of Nemuri’s sister, the energy seemed to seep right out of that girl. Ghostly white, her pale skin turned almost translucent as the blood drained from her face, pooling down into the soles of her feet. For what felt like ages, she said absolutely nothing, her subtle frown, unreadable, just like her father’s. Finally, after what seemed like a century’s pause, she took a sharp inhale of breath and spoke.

“It’s okay,” she said, conspicuously curt. “I was just a little kid when Nemu died. I barely even remember her, anyway.” Glancing away from him, she gently folded her hands in front of her stomach. Her nails shimmered brightly, a familiar, dark blue. “Most of everything that I know about her, I heard secondhand from Daddy. He talks about her all the time – about how smart she was, and how graceful, and pensive. Apparently, she was a lot like him when he was little. He still talks about her like she’s family, but to be honest, she doesn’t really mean anything to me. Nemu is just a stranger.”

Zaraki wasn’t exactly the sensitive type, but even he knew that was heavy emotional shit, better entrusted to a man in a white coat and glasses than to some violent ex-con in a coffee shop. He couldn’t muster up the courage or the wisdom to say much of anything, but his silence didn’t seem to deter Nemuri in the slightest. On the contrary, it fueled her. That girl just kept on going, her high-pitched, neutral voice growing louder and louder by the second. 

“Daddy talks a lot about you, too, you know?” she added, looking up at him with a wistful smile. “He almost never says anything nice, but I can tell that, underneath it all, he really does like you. He wouldn’t even mention your name, if he didn’t. You’re lucky. He always has time for you, doesn’t he? He’s always too busy with work to come and see me, even when it’s our weekends together, but he always has time to come here and talk to you.” 

“It’s only because this café is close to his office,” Zaraki bit back, hoping to nip their awkward conversation in the bud. “It’s not like he goes out of his way to buy his coffee here. If coming here wasn’t so convenient, he’d go somewhere else.”

“You’re wrong about that,” Nemuri muttered, her eyes, glued to the floor. Her hands twitched as she blindly picked at a hangnail, puffy and red. Even when she drew blood, she didn’t stop. Not for a second. “It’s not about the convenience. Even if Daddy moved his main office to another city, he’d still drive all the way here every morning, just to see you. He’d probably drive his stupid Ferrari just to impress you, on top of that.”

His first instinct was to ask whether Kurotsuchi really did have that Ferrari – but somehow, by the grace of some god, he was able to rein back his morbid curiosity. 

“Look kid, I don’t know what kind of relationship you think I got with your dad, but we ain’t as close as you think we are. Hell, we ain’t even friends.” 

That’s what Kurotsuchi said, after all. 

“Is he the one who told you that? I think he’s lying, maybe even to himself. He always says that he’s an introvert, and he doesn’t need friends, and he’s better off alone, but I really do think that he likes you, even if he won’t admit it. He says that you’re a good listener. I think he even believes that, in your own way, you understand him. It’s not very often that Daddy ever feels that way about other people,” she chuckled. The quiet sound, empty and joyless, clashed against the calm of her expressionless smile. “Nobody _ever_ understands him. That’s part of what he thinks makes him charming. He’s an enigma. A puzzle that nobody can put together. Not my mom and not me. The only people that have ever managed to connect the pieces are Urahara-san, and my sister… and you.” 

Oh, gods.

“Hey, c’mon kid. Don’t get all upset. Here. You better sit down for a bit,” Zaraki prompted with an exasperated sigh, walking around to her side of the counter to better direct her. That close, it was easier to see that although she’d managed to hold back her tears, that little girl was shaking. “How ‘bout I get you a piece of cake and –”

“I don’t like sweets,” she interjected, her voice, weak and strained. “I haven’t liked them for a long time.”

“But Kurotsuchi got you a piece of cake from here a while ago, right? You didn’t like it?”

“Daddy got me cake because he doesn’t know what I like,” she snapped with a strangely childish stamp of her foot, her Mary Jane, clacking against the tile. “He doesn’t know anything about me. I’m not a little kid anymore. I haven’t liked sweets for a long time,” she repeated. When she finally regained the courage to look back up at him, her eyes were on fire, her gaze, determined. “Where is Daddy, anyway? He comes here every day, doesn’t he? He has to be at the office in half an hour. He should be here by now, if he doesn’t want to be late to work.”

“He stopped by earlier. You just missed him, actually,” Zaraki answered, crossing his arms. 

“But… that’s not possible,” she scoffed, furrowing her brow. “How could he possibly come any earlier? I came in right when you opened.”

“Yeah, about that, I’ve been… making an exception for him,” Zaraki admitted, more than just a little embarrassed to admit it. “I unlock the doors for your dad at around five-thirty, so for a while, it’s just the two of us.” 

“He comes here at five-thirty in the morning?” Nemuri echoed, her tone, incredulous. “Does he even complain to you about how sleepy he is? I could barely get Daddy to wake up at six to catch the plane to New York last summer, and he was whining about being tired during the entire trip. He didn’t even try to hide how much he hated it,” she scoffed, her bitter, half-laughter, shallow and cold. 

“Being a parent is tough. I’m sure Kurotsuchi’s doing the best he can,” Zaraki recited, providing a generic, by the book answer, just because it felt like the only reasonable option, at the time. He wasn’t about to throw Kurotsuchi under the bus, anyway, even when he really was starting to seem like an absentee father. 

Not that any of his platitudes managed to fool Nemuri in the slightest. She was Kurotsuchi’s daughter, after all – sharp as a tack. 

“No,” she countered. “I’ve seen Daddy at his best. He can pull off miracles if he puts in the effort,” her voice, overflowing with a clashing combination of anger and resentment, trembled from the force of holding back tears. 

“What do you mean?”

“Have you ever heard of Amrita?” Before Zaraki could even say that he hadn’t, Nemuri answered for him. “It’s the cure for Guillain-Barre syndrome. Daddy was the head researcher of the team that synthesized it. When it was in its final trial phase, he stayed in the lab for almost two months straight. He’d eat nothing but instant noodles and protein shakes, and at the end of the day, he’d pull a little cot out of his closet, and he’d sleep in his office, just so that he didn’t have to waste time driving home. I didn’t see him at all during that time, and all of his personal calls went straight to his assistants’ voicemails. Not even Mom’s lawyers got through to him.”

“Damn. That’s like two months in solitary.” If anyone would himself through that to get results, however, it’d be Kurotsuchi. “I’ve heard of commitment, but that’s goin’ overboard.”

“That’s Daddy, for you. He’s the fiercely devoted, passionate type. At least when it comes to the things that he cares about.” 

Zaraki drew back, glaring nervously at her from the corner of his single eye. “You’re… kind of makin’ it sound like you don’t think your dad cares a lot about you.”

“I wonder about that. Sometimes I think to myself that the world could be on fire, and everyone could be dying – _I_ could be dying – but if Daddy’s precious lab was okay, I don’t think he’d even notice.”

“That ain’t true,” Zaraki sighed, rubbing awkwardly at his neck. As much as he didn’t want to gossip about Kurotsuchi behind his back, he couldn’t exactly keep quiet, either. “Even if he’s a –” opportunistic motherfucker that would sell his own grandmother for a good cup of coffee – “a _bit of a jerk_ , your dad has always cared about you and your sister. I don’t know if he ever told you this, but it hit him hard when Nemu died. It’d kill him if something happened to you, too.”

“It’s very kind of you to say that, Zaraki-san,” Nemuri said, looking up at him with the kind of bright, innocent smile that only children could ever muster. “But I think that Daddy only misses my sister so much because of how similar they were. She was a prodigy, just like him, you know? But me? I’m not really good at the things he likes.”

“What, you mean numbers and chemistry? Most kids ain’t good at that shit.”

“I’m not supposed to be ‘most kids.’” Unable to make eye contact, the little girl wrung her fingers together, squeezing and fidgeting until her knuckles turned white. “When Daddy was my age, he was already the NHK shogi champion. People were lining up to give him scholarships. He wasn’t just… sitting around and twiddling his thumbs like I am. I don’t have a lot of time to catch up to him.”

“What makes you think you have to? You’re not your dad. You don’t have to do everything he does.”

“I have to, if I want be someone that’s worth his time. You should see the way he looks at other people. Like they disgust him. Normal people are just annoyances to him. If I want Daddy to see me, to really _see me_ , I have to be special.”

“No, you don’t,” he grumbled, growing frustrated. “Hell, look at me. I don’t got any fancy degrees, or shogi trophies, or whatever, and your dad still talks to me, don’t he?”

“Maybe you’re not as smart as he is, but you’re still special,” Nemuri argued, tilting her head and glancing over him with a curious smile, slightly chipped – a carbon copy of Kurotsuchi. “Well, you’re special to him, anyway.”

Zaraki paused for a moment, pondering her words and trying in vain to find some meaning in her blank expression. 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

The little girl worried her lip for a moment, before she shook her head, derailing her own train of thought. 

“It’s nothing,” she stated, putting a stop to the conversation. “I’m sorry for wasting your time, Zaraki-san. I didn’t even buy anything.” 

“You don’t have to buy anything to come here. You’re Kurotsuchi’s kid. You can stop by whenever you want.”

Though Zaraki had meant to be friendly, the girl’s frown deepened. She clenched her little fists until her knuckles turned white, her hands, shaking, until she finally released her grip along with a despondent sigh. Taking in another deep breath, she dug into her pocket and pulled out a small stack of ten thousand yen notes. 

“Here. I want you to have this.”

“Damn. That’s serious money. What’re you giving me that for?” Zaraki questioned, his eyes, locked onto the bills. Perhaps it spoke to his own desperate state of destitution, but that was more money than he’d seen in a very long time. 

“It’s just a way for me to apologize for wasting your time. And a way to say… thank you for looking after Daddy. I know it seems like I don’t like him very much – and maybe sometimes I don’t – but even when we fight, I still love him.”

“You don’t have to give me any money for hanging out with your old man. Kurotsuchi is my –” Well, if he had to be honest with himself, Zaraki didn’t know exactly what they were: something a bit too personal, a bit too close, yet far too antagonistic, at times, to be classified as simple friends. Theirs was a complicated case, a soft and gentle fondness, a mournful longing, and a festering bite of cruelty and competition. 

He didn’t know how to begin to label them. 

“You don’t have to say it,” Nemuri interrupted, chuckling through a sad, subtle smile. 

“Are you sure you want me to have this?” Zaraki asked once more. “It really is a lot of money.”

“Not for me. Daddy does really well for himself. I don’t really want any of his money, but he keeps sending it along with Mom’s alimony checks. Honestly, though, Daddy’s money doesn’t really mean anything to me, so, you can have it instead, Zaraki-san. Your job doesn’t pay a lot, does it? You should use it to buy something nice for yourself.”

“Come on,” he scoffed, almost offended. “Who the hell do you think I am? I ain’t so pathetic that I’ll take a little girl’s money.”

“Then you should think of it as an indirect gift from my father. You wouldn’t mind that so much, would you?”

No. He wouldn’t.

“A gift from Kurotsuchi, huh?” he echoed.

“I’m sure he’d want you to be happy,” she said with a smile, as Zaraki somewhat reluctantly took the money, slipping it into the pocket of his apron. “He really does like you,” Nemuri said once more, drawing Zaraki’s attention.

“You know,” he began, finally deciding to call her out, “the way you’re sayin’ that, I can’t tell whether you’re happy about it or just plain pissed off.”

“Maybe a little of both,” the girl admitted, surprisingly frank. Spoken with a shameless confidence, so reminiscent of her father. “Daddy really goes out of his way to be with you, but I don’t think he’d put in half as much effort to be with me.” 

“You don’t got any proof of that. Of course he wants to be with you. You’re his little girl.”

She hesitated for a moment, her hands, fidgeting, peeling at her hangnail. In its wake, a little spot of bright, red blood blossomed at the edge of her thumb. 

“Can I tell you a secret, Zaraki-san?” she asked him, suddenly. 

“I don’t –”

He was about to say no, about to insist that other people have spilled enough of Kurotsuchi’s secrets to him, but before he could so much as protest, Nemuri continued, taking advantage of the momentum she’d built. 

“My mom is suing Daddy for full custody of me,” she said with an almost distant neutrality, as though she’d removed herself from the painful reality of the entire situation. “She told me that she’s doing it because Daddy’s a bad father. A deadbeat. Because he’s the kind of daddy that takes me to Disney World once a year and thinks it makes up for missing all of my recitals, and not knowing who any of my friends are. And it doesn’t help his case that he rolls up to my school and to even court in his tacky car, dressed up like… whatever he dresses up as. A demon king, maybe,” she half-laughed, shaking her head. “So embarrassing.”

“I don’t think he’s trying to embarrass you,” Zaraki muttered, pointlessly trying his best to defend a man who didn’t give a damn about what anyone thought of him. “I think that Kurotsuchi just wants to live his life a certain way, and he’s not about to make himself fit in, just because other people want him to.”

“So he won’t even change anything about himself for me?” she asked, her eyes, downcast. She seemed to huddle into herself, slumping her shoulders and cradling her arms. “Not even when the judge thinks he’s childish for playing make believe all the time? You know that makes it look like he’s not mature enough to be a dad.”

“That just sounds like the judge is making assumptions about him just by the way he looks.”

And, damn, didn’t that get on Zaraki’s nerves. To his surprise, despite Nemuri’s complains about her father, she actually agreed.

“I know,” she admitted, closing her eyes, “and it’s not fair to him or me, but that’s just the way it is. The point is that Daddy refuses to show up to court looking clean cut and normal – not even once – even for me.”

A stifling silence fell upon them both, heavier than iron. Unable to make eye contact, the little girl, embarrassed by her outburst, continued peeling away at her bleeding hangnail until the piece of skin came cleanly off. Zaraki took a deep breath and leaned back against the counter, feeling the wood dig into his tailbone. He crossed his arms and glared down, intimidating in his natural authority.

“You know I’m going to have to tell your dad about everything you said, right?”

“He already knows how I feel about all of this,” she mumbled. “But you can go ahead and tell him. Maybe it’ll help if he hears it from someone else, too.” 

She sighed a sigh so deep and weary, it seemed to rise up from the belly of the earth. It harbored an exhaustion so ancient, so exhausted, that the juxtaposition of it all against her youthful appearance left him shellshocked. But then she looked up at him with a fragile, wary smile, effervescent, and pointed a little, painted finger towards the glass pastry case. “You know, Zaraki-san, if it’s okay with you, I think I’ve changed my mind about the cake. It really does look good.”

“I thought you said you didn’t like sweets,” he teased, relieved at the slightly lightened mood. It felt like he could breathe again, with the weight of the Kurotsuchi family’s burdens, lifted off his shoulders. 

“I usually don’t… but yours are pretty good,” she admitted with a sheepish chuckle, as she took a seat at the bar. “I think that even Daddy would like them.”

“Yeah?” Zaraki asked, leaning over the counter, looking down at her with a smile, as he slid a piece of chocolate cake her way. “You know what kind of flavors he likes? I can’t really see him as a strawberry or confetti cake kind of guy.”

“I know Daddy looks kind of… strange, but he’s actually very old-fashioned at heart. He grew up in the countryside, where they still have chickens, and rice paddies, and everything. I think that’s why he likes simple, traditional foods. You know: flavors like matcha and azuki.” 

“Huh. Sounds nasty. Can’t say I ever made a red bean cake,” Zaraki muttered, already horrified at the mere thought of it. 

“Maybe you should,” she chirped, finally acting more like a schoolgirl than a despondent, miniature version of her father. “If anyone could make a red bean cake taste good, it’s you, Zaraki-san. If you make it, then maybe then we could all have coffee and cake together. You, me, and Daddy.”

“Me too?” he asked with an amused, breathy laugh. “Since when was I a part of the Kurotsuchi clan?”

“Since you started talking to Daddy. Maybe you’re not exactly family, but he really, _really_ –” She stopped herself mid-sentence, glancing up at him, wide eyed, before conspicuously focusing all of her attention down onto her cake. She ate at a furious pace, lapping up the frosting. 

“He really, really… what? What about Kurotsuchi?”

“It’s nothing,” she denied, furiously shaking her head, before she slowed, suddenly, and finally stilled. Though her face was expressionless, when their eyes met, Nemuri’s seemed to take on a familiar, otherworldly light, shrewd, bright, and cunning, just as sharp as her father’s. “That’s Daddy’s secret to tell.”


End file.
